Rittner D. A to Z of Scientists in Weather and Climate

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

it would be as impossible to draw the Figure and

shape of every one of them, as to imitate exactly

the curious and Geometrical Mechanisme of

Nature in any one.” This was a suggestion that no

two were alike, later proven photographically by

ilson

BENTLEY

in the 20th century.

Hooke also invented a wind gauge (anemo-

meter) that was similar to Leon Battista

ALBERTI

’s

and is often considered the inventor of this wind

device. Although Alberti was the first to illus-

trate one in his book On the Pleasures of Mathe-

matics in 1450, there is no evidence that he

actually built an anemometer

. Hooke was also the

first to coin the word cell that he attributed to the

porous structure of cork, although he failed to

realize they were the basic units of life.

In Micrographia, he also proposed a wave the-

ory of light and made observations about lunar

craters and how they formed. His astronomical

contributions, besides creating the first reflecting

telescope, also included making the first observa-

tion of the rotation of Mars. Hooke discovered

the fifth star in Orion, inferred the rotation of

Jupiter (1664), and noted one of the earliest

examples of a double star

. In 1669, he made the

earliest attempt to measure the parallax of a fixed

star. This led directly to James Bradley’s discov-

ery of stellar aberration in 1728.

His contributions were many but in the field

of meteorology can be added the inventions of a

wheel barometer, a double barometer, and a

marine barometer. He also suggested the freezing

point of water to be set as the zero point on the

thermometer, later refined by Daniel

FARHEN

HEIT

and Anders

CELSIUS

. He also proposed the

creation of a weather clock to record barometric

pressure, temperature, rainfall, humidity, and

wind velocity on a rotating drum.

In 1674, Hooke’s Attempt to Prove the Motion

of the Earth offered a theory of planetary motion

in mechanical terms, based on inertia, and a bal-

ance between the Earth’

s centrifugal force and the

gravitation attraction of the Sun. Later, in a letter

dated January 6, 1680, he wrote to Newton, sug-

gesting that the attraction would vary inversely as

the square of the distance between the Sun and

the Earth. Hooke anticipated universal gravita-

tion, but he did not have the mathematical abil-

ity to formulate his theories into tangible terms.

Newton did later, and this led to the feeling by

Hooke that Newton stole from him. He did not

get along with Christiaan Huygens either about

one of his watch inventions.

In 1667, he described how sound could be

transmitted using a tightly stretched wire, basi-

cally inventing the string telegraph, or as some

call it, the string telephone; most school-age

youngsters are familiar with this device (tin cans

and string). In keeping with this interest, in 1684,

he devised a system of telegraphy based on visual

signaling. Hooke’s interest in flight and air char-

acteristics led him to formulate what physicists

call Hooke’s law: the extension of a spring is pro-

portional to the weight hanging from it. This was

published in 1678 in De Potentia Restitutiva.

Because of his controversies with competing

claims with Christiaan Huygens about the inven-

tion of the spring regulator and with Newton, first

about optics (1672) and second about the formu-

lation of the inverse square law of gravitation

(1686), Hooke fell out of favor in the scientific

community. He died in London on March 3,

1703, and was buried in Bishopsgate; however

sometime in the 19th century, his bones were

removed. No one knows where he is buried today.

5 Howard, Luke

(1772–1864)

English

Chemist, Meteorologist

Luke Howard, called the Godfather of Clouds

and the Father of British Meteorology

, is an

unlikely honoree. He was a successful chemist

and pharmacist and the head of his own business

in what seems far removed from the halls of mete-

orology. Yet, as a boy, he was fascinated by clouds,

84 Howard, Luke

became an amateur meteorologist, and made seri-

ous contributions to the field.

Born in London on Red Cross Street on No-

vember 28, 1772, he was the first child of Quaker

parents Robert and Elizabeth Howard. Howard

was sent by his father to a Friends (Quaker) gram-

mar school (Thomas Huntly’s School) at Burford,

near Oxford, where he studied for seven years

(1780–87), especially Latin.

The year 1783 was pivotal in Howard’s devel-

oping an interest in meteorology. It was a year of

atmospheric fireworks. Two volcanic eruptions in

Iceland and Japan respectively produced brilliant

sunsets and a blanket of ash that covered England.

That was topped by earthquakes and a meteor

streaking overhead, observed by 10,000 people,

including Howard, then 11 years old.

Howard returned to London in 1787 and

became a chemist’s apprentice and, by 1807,

owned his own chemical-manufacturing labora-

tory. A charter member, on March 23, 1796, of the

Askesian Society (Greek for “training”), founded

by William Allen, Richard Phillips, and William

H. Pepys, he sought with them to promote mutual

improvement in matters of science. This club later

became The Geological Society of London in

1807. Howard also took the time to marry Mari-

abell Eliot on December 7, 1796. They had three

boys and three girls between 1797 and 1811.

Although the members of the Askesian Soci-

ety participated in group inhalations of nitrous

oxide, it is not known if these experiences gave

them any further insight. Howard was a fan of the

Swedish botanist Linnaeus, who classified plants

and animals using Latin, then the language of

educated men and a language with which

Howard was well familiar from his childhood

schooling. It is no doubt that this systematic

thinking of Linnaeus allowed Howard to think

about classifying clouds. Before 1800, clouds were

considered unlikely to be classified due to their

changing shapes and transient nature.

One of the rules of the Askesian Society was

that each member had to bring a paper to read

and for discussion or pay a fine. In 1802, Howard

read his “Essay on Modifications of Clouds,” in

which he classified four main types: cumulus

(Latin for “heap”), stratus (layer), nimbus (rain),

and cirrus (curl). He also added intermediate

types such as cirro-cumulus, cirro-stratus, and

cumulo-stratus. By using Latin names, he made

his types universal and widely accepted. This was

well received and published the following year in

The Cyclopaedia; or Universal Dictionary of Arts,

Sciences and Literature (by Abraham Rees, origi-

nally published in 90 parts between 1802 and

1820) and in Tilloch’s Philosophical Magazine, vols.

XVI, XVII. This was the same year that the

naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published his

cloud classification scheme, but it never took

hold. Howard’s major groups, with a few addi-

tions, are still in use to

day. Even Goethe wrote a

poem based on his four cloud types.

In 1818–19, Howard presented his Seven Lec-

tures on Meteorology (later published in 1837 as

the first textbook on weather). He followed it up

in 1821 with the two-volume The Climate of Lon-

don (later three volumes in 1833). On August 3,

1821, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society

for his contributions in meteorology.

In 1847, he published Barometrographia:

wenty Years’ Variation of the Barometer in the Cli-

mate Of Britain, Exhibited in Autographic Curves,

with the Attendant Winds and Weather, and Copi-

ous Notes Illustrative to the Subject, a booklet on

barometric observations made at his home in

Tottenham for the years 1815–34. He published

as an appendix to this report in 1854, Papers

On Meteorology

, Relating Especially To The Cli-

mate Of Britain And To The Variations Of The

Barometer.

Howard, a lifelong member of the Society of

Friends (Quakers), died in March 1864 at Bruce

Grove, T

ottenham, Middlesex.

Howard, Luke 85

5 Kalnay, Eugenia Enriqueta

(1942– )

Argentinian/American

Meteorologist

Eugenia Kalnay was born in Buenos Aires, Argen-

tina, and became a U.S. citizen in 1978. The sev-

enth of eight children, she was the daughter of

Jorge Kalnay

, an architect in Buenos Aires, and

Susana Zwicky, a real estate agent. After attending

the very good public schools in Buenos Aires, she

went to the University of Buenos Aires, where she

received her Licenciatura en Ciencias Meteoro-

logicas in 1965 (a license is a degree in between a

bachelor of science degree and a master’s degree).

Kalnay received a scholarship from the National

Weather Service in Argentina and had teaching

assistantships from the university. She became a

researcher at the university when she graduated.

However, when the military took over in 1966 and

entered by force into the school of sciences, she

resigned, like many of her colleagues.

Kalnay moved to Boston and in 1971 was the

first woman to earn a Ph.D. at MIT in meteorol-

ogy (and the first student in the department to

have a baby). Her thesis, “The circulation of the

atmosphere of Venus,” was mentored by Jule G.

CHARNEY

. After receiving her Ph.D., she

obtained an assistant professorship at the Uni-

versity of Montevideo, Uruguay.

In 1972, she published her first paper, “On

the Use of Non-uniform Grids in Finite Differ-

ence Equations,” in the Journal of Computational

Physics, followed in 1973 by “Numerical Models

of the Circulation of the Atmosphere of V

enus”

in the Journal of Atmospheric Science. She returned

to MIT in the fall of 1973, when the military took

over the government in Uruguay

Beginning in 1973, Kalnay was a research

associate in the department of meteorology at

MIT and in 1977 was promoted to associate pro-

fessor. In 1979, she moved to NASA Goddard

Space Flight Center, where in 1984 she became

the head of NASA’s global modeling and simula-

tion branch at the Goddard Laboratory for

Atmospheres. In 1987, Kalnay became the direc-

tor of the Environmental Modeling Center (for-

merly the Development Division) of the

National Centers for Environmental Prediction

(NCEP), and in 1997, she was named the NCEP

deputy for science. In 1999, she became professor

and chair of the department of meteorology at

the University of Maryland.

Kalnay has extensive research experience

and has refereed publications in atmospheric

dynamics, general circulation modeling, numer-

ical weather prediction, numerical analysis, the

atmosphere of Venus, use of satellite data, atmo-

spheric predictability, data assimilation, and

ensemble forecasting (a technique developed that

utilizes several forecasts). She has made several

important contributions to the study of weather:

in her thesis, Kalnay found that the atmosphere

of Venus, though very deep, is warmed near the

surface by a greenhouse effect and not by a

dynamic circulation driven at the cloud level.

This discovery explained why the surface of Venus

is surprisingly hot. In 1977, she developed fourth-

order quadratically conservative finite difference

models (used in the NASA fourth-order global

model for more than 15 years). Her model at

NASA was used and continues to be used for

applications of satellite data, among other func-

tions. In 1983, she developed a method (lagged

average forecasting, or LAF) for ensemble fore-

casting. Her method of LAF was the most widely

used for ensemble forecasting until 1993 when her

more-advanced method of “breeding growing per-

turbations” became the method for the National

Weather Service and other operational centers.

Breeding creates very effective perturbations and

is now being found to be very useful for data

assimilation because the bred perturbations are

similar in shape to the forecast errors, which

therefore can be removed effectively from the ini-

tial conditions.

Kalnay has also made a number of dynami-

cal, numerical, and other contributions in atmo-

spheric predictability, including the most

accepted explanation of the origin of closed and

open convection. She has developed applications

of atmospheric chaos and predictability, physical

mechanisms to explain a drought in Texas and

Oklahoma in 1998, and improved numerical

methods. From 1993 to 1997, she directed the

NCEP 50-year Reanalysis Project, which pro-

vided researchers, for the first time, with a twice-

daily detailed description of the state of the

atmosphere throughout the globe. The availabil-

ity of the reanalysis has resulted into more

research papers throughout the world than any

previous database. During the decade in which

she directed the Environmental Modeling Cen-

ter of the National Weather Service, Kalnay

oversaw major improvements and new develop-

ments. The skill of the operational forecasts dou-

bled during those years. Finally, her new textbook

Atmospheric Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Pre-

dictability (2002) describes, in clear and compre-

hensive terms, the three central areas of r

esearch

in numerical weather prediction.

Kalnay has served on many scientific com-

mittees, advised a number of M.S., Ph.D., and

postdoctoral students, is the author of more than

70 scientific papers, and has served in editorial

positions for a number of scientific journals.

Among the numerous awards for her work are the

NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achieve-

ment (1981), Department of Commerce Silver

Medal (1990), Department of Commerce Gold

Medal awarded to the Development Division

(1993), American Meteorological Society Jule G.

Charney Award (1995), Senior Executive Service

Presidential Rank Award (1996), and the Depart-

ment of Commerce Gold Medal for the Reanaly-

sis Project (1997). She is a member of the

Academia Europaea (1999), and National Aca-

demy of Engineering (1996), and a Fellow of the

American Meteorological Society (1982); was

elected Distinguished University Professor at the

University of Maryland (2001); and in 1998–99

was awarded the Robert E. Lowry endowed chair

at the University of Oklahoma.

Kalnay married Malise Cooper Dick (1982)

and has a son from a previous marriage. Of all her

accomplishments, her most satisfying were being

director of the NWS Environmental Modeling

Center, where during her tenure it was trans-

formed into a leading research and operations

center, and directing the Reanalysis Project. Her

most important scientific accomplishment was

her coinvention with Zoltan Toth of the method

of breeding, which is a very simple and effective

method to perform perturbations for ensemble

forecasting. The availability of ensemble forecasts

has become an important tool for human fore-

casters, who now have a tool that provides them

with confidence in the forecasts (if the members

88 Kalnay, Eugenia Enriqueta

of the ensemble are in agreement), or lets them

know that the forecasts have lost their skill

(when the members of the ensemble give differ-

ent solutions). To quote one of the NWS regional

directors, she put “for the first time, the theory of

chaos to practical use.” Kalnay continues her

work at the University of Maryland where she is

currently working on the use of breeding for data

assimilation to further increase the skill of the

forecasts.

5 Katsaros, Kristina

(1938– )

Swedish

Meteorologist

Kristina Katsaros was born on July 24, 1938, and

raised in Göteborg, Sweden, where she chose a

physical-science emphasis in high school at Flick-

läeroverket i Göteborg, Göteborg, Sweden. She

had very supportive parents, who believed that a

woman should have as good an education as a

man for her independence and security. Her

father

, G.A. Sander, was an engineer, and her

mother, Ester Sander (born Sundstroem), was

trained to be a teacher but spent most of her adult

life caring for her family full time. After gradua-

tion, Katsaros spent a year as an exchange student

at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Although she was enrolled as a freshman, the

school gave her two-thirds of a year credit

because of the advanced status of the Swedish

high school she had attended. The year 1957–58

was meant to be a break from intense studying:

she intended to apply to a chemistry program at

the Chalmer’s Institute in her hometown when

she returned to Sweden; however, life led her

down a different path.

In fall 1957, she met Michael A. Katsaros

and decided to spend a second year at the Uni-

versity of Washington; that meant looking for

something “serious” to study. Because of her

interest in chemistry, she checked out the depart-

ment (it was housed in a large, forbidding build-

ing) but fortuitously came upon the department

of meteorology and climatology, where she

walked in and was warmly welcomed by its chair,

Dr. Phil Church.

Katsaros signed up for summer school of 1958

and was invited by one of the professors, Konrad

J. K. Buettner, to participate in a field program to

measure the mountain and valley winds around

the beautiful volcano, Mount Rainer. “What a

glorious time it was to charge into the mountains

at dawn with a group of comrades to set up sta-

tions and launch balloons around the clock,” she

wrote. The team measured the positions of the

balloons with theodolites (instruments that find

the object in an optical system—like binocu-

lars—and measures the angles of the tube hold-

ing the optics). They later calculated the winds

Katsaros, Kristina 89

Kristina Katsaros. Katsaros was the first woman to earn

a Ph.D. in her department at the Atlantic Oceano-

graphic and Meteorological Laboratory, a NOAA

Research Laboratory, and the first woman faculty

member in that department. She is the first woman

in a position as laboratory director in the NOAA

research organization. (Courtesy of Kristina Katsaros)

up or down slope and to or from the mountain.

She was hooked on this kind of fieldwork for life

and is forever grateful to her friend and mentor,

Buettner, who a few years later became her “the-

sis father” as they say in his native language, Ger-

man, when she enrolled in graduate school. Once

she had finished her B.S. in meteorology and cli-

matology in 1960 at University of Washington, it

was time to take her husband to meet her family

in Göeteborg.

They lived there two full years, and she stud-

ied some astronomy; worked for a graduate stu-

dent at the Chalmer’s Institute studying the

rotation of the arms in our galaxy, the Milky Way,

using microwave radiometry; and also partici-

pated in the first Swedish pollution study, for

which she was supervised by the chief meteorol-

ogist at the local airport, Martin William-Olson.

Over coffee, they talked and she received his

good advice “not to dust away my life.” She has

since lived up to that advice: she went back to

the University of Washington and started a

course in atmospheric sciences (the new name of

her old department). By 1969, she had her Ph.D.

in atmospheric sciences from the University of

Washington, and her first child Anthony was

then three years old. Her thesis topic was the

effect of rain on the so-called cool film on top of

the ocean, of interest to the new science of

remote sensing from satellites by infrared sensors.

A year after the thesis, she had another daughter,

Ester. Sadly, her thesis father died in 1970 while

at Yale University as a guest professor, something

of which he was very proud, but he had greeted

her daughter welcome into the world six months

earlier. He was very supportive of her dual role as

mother and researcher, something exceptional in

this attitude for his time. Much credit goes to his

artist wife Lucie Buettner who remained Kat-

saros’s friend until her death 30 years later.

Another mentor from her thesis committee,

Joost A. Businger, then invited her into his re-

search group, and she began to write her own pro-

posals for funding. The Office of Naval Research

funded her work for most of the 1970s when she

studied, together with her first graduate student,

Dr. W. Timothy Liu, the boundary layer on a con-

vecting water body in laboratory tanks and also

in the Arctic Ocean, in a swimming pool, and on

Lake Washington (in Seattle). She participated

in a field program, the Joint Air-Sea Interaction

Program (JASIN) in 1978, in which they had

radiation sensors on a ship and she flew in a

research aircraft over the North Atlantic Ocean

off Scotland. The aircraft carried radiation sen-

sors and so-called infrared radiation thermome-

ters to measure sea surface temperature (SST).

Simultaneously, she was developing a field station

for measurements of air–sea interaction phenom-

ena, turbulent fluxes of heat and water vapor, and

wave generation and their maintenance. Katsaros

was also using this station in teaching a summer

course each year (since 1976) for international

students with financial support from the North

Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Her two

children, healthy and fine, made it easy for this

mother of two to gradually take on full-time and

more-demanding work.

In 1978, SEASAT, an experimental satellite,

was launched by NASA, and she was able to join

one of its science teams. Originally, she thought

the new satellite data would contribute to her

JASIN research, but her interests quickly ex-

panded with the new fantastic data obtained by

microwaves (like radio and radars), so she began

to use the new data to study cyclones in midlati-

tudes, particularly weather fronts. Several gradu-

ate students worked with her on the storm

analyses and on developing methods for inter-

preting the satellite microwave signals in terms of

atmospheric water vapor content, cloud water

content, and precipitation. During the next 25

years, similar instruments were launched in the

United States, Europe, Japan, and most recently

in India as well.

During the 1980s, Katsaros also continued

work on wind and wave research on Lake Wash-

ington, which was very much related to the new

90 Katsaros, Kristina

sensors that infer winds on the ocean surface from

the effects of roughness on radar backscatter or

emission from the sea. Some of this research in

collaboration with European colleagues took

place from a research platform in the German

Bight in 1979. That Marine Remote Sensing

Experiment (MARSEN) was followed by the

Humidity Exchange over the Sea Experiment

(HEXOS) study in 1984 and 1986, with resulting

publications appearing into the mid-1990s. In the

1990s, there was another major field program, the

Surface Wave Dynamics Experiment (SWADE)

off the East Coast of the United States, where she

looked for the effects of varying swell and wind

sea on the stress that the wind exerts on the sea

surface, which in turns makes the waves grow.

After securing an academic professorship in

the atmospheric sciences department at Univer-

sity of Washington in 1983, Katsaros took on

more teaching duties, continuing the NATO

course summer after summer and visiting Europe

for month-long stays in Denmark, the Nether-

lands, France, Germany, and Portugal. Finally in

1992, she accepted a position in France, where all

her experience in microwave satellite and air–sea

interaction work came together. She became the

first director of the department of oceanography

from space at Institut Français de la Recherche et

de L’Exploitation de la Mer (IFREMER) in Brest,

France. It was a newly formed group of about 20

people, scientists and computer engineers, who

were responsible for certain aspects of the data

collected by the first European remote Sensing

Satellite (ERS 1), which had many instruments

that were the offspring (new and improved) of

the SEASAT experiment. It was a very exciting

and stimulating time period of her life, yet hard

work and challenging, especially because it was

carried out mostly in French. Katsaros was the

only non–French-speaking person, but she had a

foundation in that difficult language and received

lots of help, especially with formal communica-

tions. She could reciprocate by editing the publi-

cations and communications with the European

Space Agency. Her slogan in life easily could be

“Join Science and Sea the World.” Her children

were grown and off to college or working, and her

husband decided to take early retirement to make

this adventure possible.

After five-and-one-half years, Katsaros and

family moved back to America, where she re-

ceived another job offer from another great

research organization—as director of the Atlantic

Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in

Miami, Florida. This research laboratory of the

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-

tion (NOAA) specializes in climate, hurricane

research, and environmental chemistry and biol-

ogy. She is more of an administrator; the Labo-

ratory has 150 employees, but with good people

around her to support the work, she still manages

to carry out some of her own research in satellite

oceanography/meteorology.

Katsaros’s career has followed opportunities on

several occasions. She remarks that she could not

possibly have set the goal at the start to reach the

position where she is today. Much of it has been

serendipitous and fortuitous. Colleagues have rec-

ognized her with a medal and membership in the

National Academy of Engineering. There have

been some challenges because she was sometimes

threading new territory. Katsaros was the first

woman to earn a Ph.D. in her department at the

Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab-

oratory, a NOAA Research Laboratory, and the

first woman faculty member in that department.

She is the first woman in a position as labo-

ratory director in the NOAA research organiza-

tion. Although all of this attention required

adjustments in etiquette for some colleagues, she

met universally strong positive support and kind-

ness. Later in her career, Katsaros met a wonder-

ful woman scientist, Joanne

SIMPSON

, whom she

considers a beacon of light from early days of her

career because she was aware of Simpson’s exis-

tence through her published and very eloquently

described work in air–sea interaction. All along,

her husband, Michael, has been her staunchest

Katsaros, Kristina 91

supporter, and so have her two children and lately

their spouses. There are even two grandchildren,

who will learn early about the functioning of

rainbows and the growth of ocean waves from

their Mormor (Swedish for “grandma”). In sum-

ming up her life, she says, “It has been a great life,

since I was able to so freely follow my bliss, that

is, my own inclination and drive. It is easy to

share of such happiness and goo

d fortune.”

5 King, Patrick

(1946– )

Canadian

Meteorologist

Patrick King was born in Wingham, Ontario, to

Owen King, a farmer

, and Dorothy, who taught

in a one-room schoolhouse. The importance of

weather there in the Lake Huron Snowbelt and

in particular an ice storm in 1958 aroused his

interest in meteorology. After the 1958 storm,

the ice was so thick that he skated on the roads

to go to school, and the ice formed such a thick

crust on the snow in the fields that the lighter

children actually skated over the fields. When

King was young, his father sold the family farm to

start a construction business, and often took King

to various job sites throughout southwestern

Ontario. Almost by osmosis, he became an expert

on the geography and physiography of the area.

After elementary school in the one-room school-

house where his mother taught, he went to Wing-

ham District High School, where he excelled in

math and science, winning a number of small

scholarships.

His knowledge of the local geography was

useful when he began to study the effects of lake

breezes on summer severe weather. As he read

through the tornado reports, he could see a con-

centration in certain areas before he even plotted

the data. After he plotted the tornado touch-

downs on a map, it was quite evident to him that

the distribution was affected by lake breezes.

King studied physics and math at Queen’s

University in Kingston, Ontario, graduating with

a B.A. in math and physics in 1968. He married

Jean Wong in 1971; they have two daughters.

After receiving his bachelor of arts degree, he was

hired by the Meteorological Service of Canada

and took a nine-month forecaster training course

and then worked as a forecaster/briefer for two

years at an air force base in New Brunswick and

for two more years as a forecaster in Gander,

Newfoundland. He then went back to the Uni-

versity of Toronto for an M.S. in atmospheric

physics in 1975. He was assigned as a research

assistant to B.W. Boville and worked for him for

two years, during which time he acted as the fore-

caster for two field projects: one studied the ozone

layer using giant balloons; the other was a cloud-

seeding project in northern Ontario.

From 1977 to 1979, King developed refresher

courses for weather forecasters. Since 1980, he has

researched methods for using satellite data in sup-

port of weather forecasting. King’s most important

discovery concerned the role of lake breezes in

triggering severe summer thunderstorms in south-

ern Ontario. Forecasters were aware that thun-

derstorms in southern Ontario were affected by

lake breezes, but the extent and inland penetra-

tion were not appreciated. Using tornado clima-

tology, he demonstrated that lake breezes seem to

trigger most tornadoes in southern Ontario. He

was a principal participant in two field projects

studying this effect, ELBOW (The Effects of Lake

Breezes On Weather) 1997 and 2001. Most of this

work was published in conference proceedings.

Forecasters in Ontario use the ideas that he

first suggested in their severe summer forecasting.

Ontario is unique in being surrounded by the

Great Lakes, and lake breezes from different lakes

interact with each other and with cold fronts.

Typically, on severe weather days, the surface air

arrives from the southwest and almost always

interacts with the lake breezes in Ontario. Simi-

lar situations occur on the U.S. side of the Great

Lakes.

92 King, Patrick

Although his most important contributions

are in the effects of lake breezes on severe weather

in southern Ontario, King has also worked in rain

estimation using satellite imagery and in wind

estimation over the oceans using scatterometer

data. A high-frequency radar instrument that

transmits pulses of energy toward the ocean and

measures the backscatter from the ocean surface.

It detects wind speed and direction over the

oceans by analyzing the backscatter from the small

wind-induced ripples on the surface of the water.

He is the author of a number of scientific papers

and has contributed to several books and ency-

clopedias. He continues his work as a research

meteorologist for the Meteorological Service of

Canada.

5 Kurihara, Yoshio

(1930– )

Japanese

Meteorologist

Yoshio Kurihara, a Japanese meteorologist, was

born on October

24, 1930, at Shingishu, Korea,

to Jun’ichi Kurihara, an agricultural engineer, and

Yoshiko Kurihara. He attended middle school in

Tokyo, Japan, graduating in 1948, and graduated

from high school, under the old system, the fol-

lowing year. He attended the University of Tokyo

in 1949 and received a B.S. in geophysics in 1953.

He received a Ph.D. in meteorology from the Uni-

versity of Tokyo in 1962. He married Michiko

Ishihara in 1960. They have two children.

From 1953 to 1959, Kurihara was a technical

officer at the Japan Meteorological Agency,

where he worked on meteorological observation

and statistics. In 1956, while at the agency he

published his first paper, “Regional numerical

weather prediction in a barotropic atmosphere by

the method of one-dimensional fourier series

with one-dimensional relaxation,” in the Journal

of the Meteorological Society of Japan. After 1959,

he was a researcher at Japan Meteorological

Agency’s Meteorological Research Institute

(1959–63, 1965–67) and U.S. NOAA

’s Geo-

physical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (1963–65,

1967–98).

Kurihara has made two important contribu-

tions to the study of weather and climate. The

first deals with research on processes of structure

change of tropical cyclones. This study sheds light

on the peculiar behavior of tropical cyclones, such

as evolution of storms, their decay after landfall,

and interaction with mountains, islands, and

oceans. The second contribution is demonstration

of the feasibility and merit of the use of a com-

prehensive three-dimensional dynamical model

for operational forecast. The model has made sig-

nificant reduction in hurricane-forecast errors.

Kurihara, Yoshio 93

Yoshio Kurihara. Kurihara is most recognized by his

peers for his construction of a hurricane-prediction

system, the first of its kind, for operational use, leading

to remarkable improvement in hurricane track forecast.

(Courtesy of Yoshio Kurihara)