A Personal Odyssey through 60 Years of Meteorology (Invited Presentation)

In my talk, I take a light look at what I consider the most rewarding parts of my career as an atmospheric scientist, with a liberal mention of the many people who have influenced and helped me along the way. I started early; it has been a great ride; and it is not over yet.

The beginning of my interest in meteorology is told by the apocryphal story of my father teaching me to read through the short weather forecast on the front page of the Waynesboro News Virginian. Every evening he would parse out the forecast, word by word. Gradually I could read the whole thing pretty much by myself. I was four years old and at this time probably 80% of my vocabulary consisted of meteorological terms like clouds, temperature, rain, snow and infamous hedge words such as “partly,” “chance,” “occasional,” “variable,” and “scattered.”

By the time I was ten years old I knew I wanted to be a meteorologist. An early gift, and one I still have today, was a Taylor maximum-minimum thermometer, a U-shaped thermometer filled with mercury with two indicators at the top of the mercury column in each tube to indicate the high and low since the thermometer was reset. About this time I also started a subscription to the Weather Bureau’s Daily Weather Map. This large blue surface map came in the mail every day. By the time I received it was three days old, but I loved it.

My favorite Christmas present in 1954 was a Taylor Weather Instrument observing kit, and I recorded my first observation on January 1, 1955. I continued recording observations until I joined the Weather Bureau as a Student Trainee in June 1962. I loved snow and the highlight of my stint as amateur weather observer in Virginia was told by my remarks in my Wednesday March 7, 1962 observation: “Very heavy snow start 1:30 AM Monday end 4:00 AM Wednesday. Total from storm 31 inches. Caused by tropical storm moving up Atlantic. Deepest snow in century here.” This entry of course referred to the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962 that devasted the Mid-Atlantic coast.

In the spring of 1962 I applied for a Student Trainee position in the Weather Bureau, and on May 18 I received a letter from the Bureau stating “Your Career Conditional Appointment as Student Trainee (Meteorology) GS-2, $3500 per annum at the Weather Bureau Airport Station, Byrd Field, Sandston, VA. Is approved. It will be satisfactory for you to report for duty to Mr. Harden, Meteorologist in Charge of the station at Richmond on June 25, 1962.”

This was my first paid job in meteorology and I was ecstatic. During the summer of 1962 I studied the Manual of Surface Observations (WBAN) Circular N as well as the manual for aviation and pibal (pilot balloons) and practiced taking observations under the supervision of Joe Harden and the other meteorologists at RIC. In August I took three observer’s exams and on September 4 received a letter from the Chief of the Weather Bureau Francis Reichelderfer “The examinations completed by you on August 16, 24 and 28, 1962 for observational duty at Richmond, Va., have been graded as follows: Aviation 83% Synoptic 93% and Pibal 90%. Therefore, you are authorized to take official weather observations.” I liked making pibal observations, in which I inflated, launched and tracked a balloon with a theodolite until it was lost in clouds or drifted too far away to be seen. During the hot, humid weather of the piedmont Virginia summer I was pleased when I observed the balloon changing direction with height, first heading toward the northeast and then gradually changing direction toward the east and then southeast signaling the winds becoming more northerly with height. I wondered why the temperature seemed to rise rather than fall under these conditions, and didn’t solve the conundrum of warmer weather with winds becoming more northerly with height until I was taught the thermal wind equation two years later at the University of Wisconsin.

It was fun tracking the pibals, especially on cool nights on the weather bureau roof. I challenged myself to see how far I could follow the balloon, even though the longer I followed it the more work there was to be done after I lost it. We had to “work up” by hand the data on azimuth and elevation angles that we had recorded (also by hand). Because of the extra work, some of the observers did not try very hard to keep the balloon in sight, and more than once I noted in their records “obscured by clouds at 5,000 feet,” even though the sky at the time was totally clear.

I started college in September 1962 at the University of Wisconsin, and despite advice from my advisor I took Reid Bryson’s survey course in meteorology. This course was designed for non-science majors, but I did not want to wait for another year to take a meteorology course. I am glad I did—Bryson was charismatic, spending a lot of time on his favorite topic, dust from the Rajasthan desert. Bryson was convinced that increasing amount of dust caused by human activities was leading to an ice age. During this year I became acquainted with professors who would have a major influence on my career over the next decade-my first advisor Werner Schwerdtfeger, Lyle Horn, Heinz Lettau, Verner Suomi, my MS and PhD thesis advisor Don Johnson, and a very fresh faculty member just graduated from MIT John Young.

Well, I have reached the word limit for this abstract so the rest of my story will have to wait until the Symposium. I hope to see many of my friends and colleagues there.