Meet Sunil Baidar

CIRES scientist Sunil Baidar joined the Atmospheric Remote Sensing research program full-time in October 2015.

What do you do here at CSL?

I am a research scientist at CSL. My research is focused on developing new retrievals and data products from Doppler lidar measurements, understanding interactions between marine boundary layer and clouds, and characterizing urban boundary layer dynamics that affect air quality. I am the principal Investigator for the upcoming Coastal Urban Plume Dynamics Study (CUPiDS) field experiment looking at the role of coastal dynamics on air quality in the New York City region.

Where are you from/where did you grow up?

I am from Banepa, Nepal. It is a small town outside the Kathmandu Valley, which includes the capital city, Kathmandu. I went to a boarding school in Kathmandu Valley at 10 so I was mostly away from home.

What was your career path to get here?

I came to the U.S. to attend Dickinson College, a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. At Dickinson, I worked for an organization that was originally founded to study the impact of acid deposition on Pennsylvania's waterways and the effectiveness of the Clean Air Act amendments. Wanting to study air quality, I applied to the chemistry graduate program at University of Colorado Boulder. I was then very fortunate to receive the ESRL-CIRES graduate fellowship to work together with CSL scientists from the Atmospheric Remote Sensing (ARS) group on synergistic applications of active and passive remote sensing instruments. As part of the project, I participated in the CalNex 2010 field experiment, and got the opportunity to work with the TOPAZ ozone lidar data. After finishing graduate school, I joined ARS to work on validating the Green Optical Autocovariance Wind Lidar (GrOWL), an airborne prototype of a future space-based system.

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

Spending time with my two daughters. They are 1 and 5 years old.

If you could hop on a plane tomorrow, where would you go?

Nepal. We have not been able to take our daughters to Nepal due to COVID.

Name one item on your bucket list.

Go on a round-the-world trip.

What animal most closely matches your personality?

A turtle - according to my wife.