Dan Keyser-Student Days at Penn State in the 1970s

I am delighted to help celebrate the career of one of the best students I have ever known, a friend and a gentleman, on this occasion of Dan’s AMS Symposium. In September 1971 I was a 27-year old Assistant Professor who had just joined the faculty in the Penn State Meteorology Department, which was located on the 5^th floor of the Deike Building on Burrowes Road in State College. I was planning my first term of teaching and advising students when an earnest teen age freshman (17 years old) Dan Keyser walked into my office and announced that I was his Advisor. I think Dan may have studied the BS degree requirements and the courses offered at Penn State more than I had, but I helped as much as I could as we worked together to develop a plan for his academic career. A couple of years later Dan was in my undergraduate dynamics class Meteorology 452. The class was large, perhaps 40 students, and Dan was at the top in many ways. I remember grading his papers and examinations first, to establish a high standard and to make sure my questions were not unreasonable or too difficult. As part of the course, I introduced numerical weather prediction (NWP) and as an example presented a simple, one-dimensional numerical model of shallow-water gravity waves as a class project. Later, in a graduate NWP course, we worked with a mixed-layer model of the planetary boundary layer. The mixed-layer modeling project led to Dan’s Master’s thesis and his first publication The Applicability of a Mixed-Layer Model of the Planetary Boundary Layer to Real-Data Forecasting, published in the Monthly Weather Review in 1977.

Even as he became proficient in numerical modeling, Dan’s primary interest was the theory of frontal circulations, which led to his PhD thesis in 1981 Frontogenesis in the planetary boundary layer of an amplifying, two-dimensional baroclinic wave. His thesis led to two Journal of Atmospheric Science publications in 1982, The influence of planetary boundary layer physics on frontal structure in the Hoskins–Bretherton horizontal shear model and An alternative expression for the Eady wave growth rate.

My brief talk will present just a few highlights of Dan’s early academic career and include a few stories and photographs of extracurricular activities that he and his friends and colleagues of those days may remember.

Well done Dan!