History of the Radar Conference

This 40th Radar Conference will mark 60 years since the first radar conference I attended, breaking Atlas’s record. It has been 76 years since the first Radar Conference that was held in Cambridge MA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1947. Thirty-seven years after 1947 in the proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Radar Meteorology Ron Reinhardt asked the question “what progress would be made in the next 37 years or even if there would still be a Radar Conference”. Since this is 39 years later it is interesting to examine what progress has been made. Indeed, the Radar Conference is still going and active. It is the longest running conference held by the American Meteorological Society.
This paper will list the time and place of all the Radar Conference. Particular attention will be given to identifying groundbreaking activities that have been reported in the Conference Proceedings. For example, the first dual Doppler analyses by Peace and Brown (1968) and Lhermitte and Miller (1970) and the first color display by Grant Gray.