The Project

The sequence of technical conferences known at various times (to the dismay of librarians everywhere) as “Weather Radar Conferences,” “Radar Meteorology Conferences,” “Conferences on Radar Meteorology,” “International Conferences on Radar Meteorology,” and even on one occasion as a “World Conference on Radio Meteorology,” began in 1947, though the official involvement of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) began only with the Fourth Conference in 1953. These were in fact the first series of specialty conferences (separate from the Annual Meeting) sponsored by the AMS. The initially rather small and close-knit community exhibited a playfulness at these conferences that continued over the years as the size and scope of the conferences increased, though this gentle irreverence now seems sadly in danger of disappearing.

The conference volumes, initially called Proceedings though they were in fact preprints from the Third Conference onward, record some of this playfulness. The first recorded example is the paper “A New Contribution to the Study of Incipient Cyclogenesis as Observed on the AN/CPS-9 PHI (sic) Scope,” in the Proceedings of the Fourth Weather Radar Conference in 1953. Many humorous conference papers have followed; one, “Ground Detection Radarmeteorology,” turned out to be prescient in anticipating by more than a decade Frederic Fabry's development of refractivity measurements. A great number of clever awards were created for the Battan Memorial Conference in 1987, and a historical diagram in the form of a tree, in a review paper by Dave Atlas and Carl Ulbrich, stimulated a poetic response from Spiros “Speed” Geotis (also known as “Spurious Geotis”). There have also been banquet talks (two of which were published in the AMS Bulletin), poems, songs, and even a full-scale musical revue that did not appear in the official conference volumes. The last of the preprint volumes, for the 31st Conference in 2003, contains what we hope will not turn out to be the last such paper. The conference volumes have been discontinued, but we nevertheless hope that these informal contributions will continue into the future.

As a service to the community, we have compiled a collection of as many of these treasures as we could locate; the poster will summarize the collection, and copies will be placed on the Radar Committee website. We included two relevant items that were not presented at radar meteorology conferences: “The Iliad of Atlas” is a poetic roast of Dave Atlas, written by an anonymous “Homer” on the occasion of Dave's leaving the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories in 1966, and “The Atlas Limericks” were composed by Roddy Rogers for the David Atlas Symposium, which was convened with the AMS Annual Meeting in Orlando in 2002. Some things appear to have been lost, such as the complete score of the musical revue at the Sixth Conference (1957) including the tunes to “Don't Take the Bright Band Away from Me” and “More Data, More Data (from Pole to Equator).” Perhaps awareness of this collection will stimulate recall of these and other missing elements in some of the senior members of the community. In any event, we hope that it will provide to the younger members some appreciation of the way these bits of humor have made the conferences more memorable, and maybe even induce some of them to carry on the tradition.