Jim Butler

Dr. Butler is currently serving as Acting Director for Strategic Planning at NOAA’s Office of Program Planning and Integration (PPI). In this capacity he is responsible for guiding development of the 2004 NOAA Strategic Plan and for ensuring an integrated approach to NOAA’s long-range planning efforts. Dr. Butler is on detail to PPI from NOAA’s Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics laboratory (CMDL), where he directs the atmospheric flask sampling network for nitrous oxide and halocarbons. He also has been Project Leader for a number of expeditions aimed at understanding the role of the ocean in regulating atmospheric composition, and for studies of air in polar snowpack to determine the composition of the atmosphere over the course of the 20th century. He was recently appointed at NOAA/CMDL as Assistant to the Director, Program Integration. Dr. Butler’s published works address the production and consumption of ozone-depleting and greenhouse gases by the ocean, the exchange of trace gases across the air-sea interface, the distribution and cycling of trace gases in the atmosphere, the distribution of trace gases in polar firn (unconsolidated snow), and methods of analysis for trace gases in the atmosphere and ocean. He is a regular contributor to international documents on stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric chemistry, and global warming. Before coming to NOAA in 1988, Dr. Butler was a Research Scientist at the University of Colorado, an Instructor at Humboldt State University, and a Project Manager at Environmental Research Consultants in California.