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

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America Meteorological Society (1985) to which

he was elected a Fellow, and the Department of

Commerce Gold Medal (1985). In 1991, he was

elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical

Union, and three years later, he was invited to

give the Symons Memorial Lecture of the United

Kingdom’s Royal Meteorological Society. He is

currently conducting research in the area of paleo-

climates—phenomena such as the recurrent ice

ages. He reasons that confidence in climate mod-

els that predict future global warming will be bol-

stered considerably if those models can explain

the very different climates the Earth has experi-

enced during its long and fascinating history.

134 Philander, S. George H.

5 Rakov, Vladimir A.

(1955– )

American

Electrical engineer

Vladimir Rakov was born on August 7, 1955, in

Semey (Semipalatinsk), Kazakhstan, to Alek-

sandr I. Rakov

, an electrical engineer, and Lidiya

D. Yakovleva, a physician. As a youngster he

enjoyed reading books and stamp collecting while

he went to high school in Semey, graduating with

honors in 1972. In 1974, he married Lioudmila D.

Fateeva, with whom he has a son. Rakov went on

to Tomsk Polytechnic University in the former

USSR and received a master’s degree in electri-

cal engineering in 1977 with his thesis “Multi-cri-

teria optimization of the parameters of the

Nurek-Regar 500-kV power transmission line.”

This study was designed for finding the design

parameters of the power line that best satisfy a

set of criteria, some of which are in conflict with

each other (for example, the minimum invest-

ment and the maximum reliability). He received

a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1983 on

the theisis “Development of techniques for the

determination of lightning peak current statisti-

cal distribution.”

Rakov first published on the multicriteria

optimization of power lines in 1978 while assis-

tant professor of electrical engineering at Tomsk

Polytechnic Institute. However, his research

interests moved to the lightning area. He devel-

oped a theory of the behavior of lightning once it

has hit the ground and determined the basic

modes of lightning-charge transfer to the ground.

His theory improved understanding of the physics

of lightning discharge and its interaction with the

environment. He has obtained more than $3.5

million in external funding for his research.

In 1991, after directing for seven years the

Lightning Research Laboratory at Tomsk Poly-

technic, Rakov became associate professor in the

department of electrical engineering, University

of Florida at Gainesville. He has published more

than 260 papers, and his major contributions deal

with the understanding of the physics and effects

of lightning. He is the lead author of the 850-

page monograph Lightning: Physics and Effects by

Rakov and Uman, and he has more than 30

inventions dealing with lightning.

Throughout his career

, his peers have recog-

nized him. In 2001, he was awarded the Institute

of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)

Power Engineering Society Surge Protective

Devices Committee, Prize Paper Award. He

received the University of Florida Research

Foundation Professorship Award for 2001–03. He

is also listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s

Who in Science and Engineering. In 1999, the

American Society for Engineering Education

135

(ASEE) awarded Rakov the Southeastern Sec-

tion Medallion Certificate, Research Unit Award

for Outstanding Contribution in Research. The

Tomsk Polytechnic Institute gave him the rank

of senior scientist in 1985 and named him the

best young scientist and best young inventor

within educational and research institutions in

Tomsk in 1981, 1985, and 1988. In 1986, USSR

State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries

gave him the medal “Inventor of the USSR,” and

the following year, the Main Committee of the

USSR Exhibition of Technological Achieve-

ments awarded Rakov the Silver Medal.

Rakov is a member of the American Geo-

physical Union (1989) and the American Mete-

orological Society (1996) and is a senior member

of IEEE (1996), the Society of Automotive Engi-

neers (SAE Aerospace, 1999), the IEEE Power

Engineering Society (2001), and the EMC Soci-

ety (2001). He has served as chair or member on

a number of committees and given numerous lec-

tures on lightning issues and research.

In 1998, he became full professor in the

department of electrical and computer engineer-

ing at the University of Florida in Gainesville, a

post he still holds today. Rakov has mentored

more than 50 students working on their graduate

theses. He continues to work in the field of light-

ning research.

5 Rasmusson, Eugene Martin

(1929– )

American

Meteorologist

Eugene Martin Rasmusson was born on a farm in

McPherson County

, Kansas, on February 27,

1929, the first of seven children of Martin Erick

and Alma Sophia (Nelson) Rasmusson. His

father was a farmer, with wheat as the major cash

crop. Farm life in central Kansas during Rasmus-

son’s childhood was quite austere, with no elec-

tricity, no indoor plumbing, and a telephone only

when it could be afforded. His first decade of life

also coincided with the wrenching drought and

dust-bowl conditions of the 1930s. He retains a

vivid memory of the consequences of this climate

catastrophe on the welfare of the farm families of

his community. The crucial nature of weather

and climate for the local farmers was a major fac-

tor in stimulating his interest in meteorology and

ultimately in determining his future career.

Rasmusson received his primary education in

a one-room rural school. One teacher, with rarely

more than two years of college training, taught all

grades in which there were students. This rarely

included all eight grades because there were

never more than a dozen students in the school.

The school year was eight months long, and like

136 Rasmusson, Eugene Martin

Vladimir A. Rakov. His major contributions deal with

the understanding of the physics and effects of light-

ning, and he has more than 30 inventions dealing with

lightning. (Courtesy of Vladimir A. Rakov)

most of the other farm children in the area, Ras-

musson spent the summers helping with the

farmwork. His horizons were greatly expanded

when at age nine the family acquired their first 6-

volt battery powered radio. This was his window

to the world and introduced him to the fascinat-

ing world of science. One of his early memories is

of a radio program that dealt with science and

history topics, sponsored by DuPont. He partic-

ularly remembers their slogan “Better things for

better living through chemistry” and an episode

that attempted to explain relativity. He remem-

bers thinking what an exciting life it would be to

be able to leave the farm and become a scientist.

Rasmusson attended high school (1942–46)

in the neighboring town of Lindsborg, Kansas

(population around 2,000), and on graduation

enrolled in the civil engineering curriculum at

Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.

During his four years at Kansas State, he also com-

pleted the advanced course in air force ROTC,

receiving a reserve commission as a second lieu-

tenant on graduation in 1950. There were no for-

mal courses in meteorology at Kansas State at that

time, but his interest in the atmospheric sciences

was greatly stimulated by an introduction to mete-

orology and weather forecasting taught as part of

his ROTC training. His graduation coincided

with the beginning of the Korean War, and after

working for only nine months as a surveyor with

the Kansas Highway Commission, he was called

to active duty in 1951. He accepted an opportu-

nity to pursue a one-year basic meteorology course

at the University of Washington (1951–52) as

preparation for his assignment as an air force

weather forecaster. This decision was to influence

the course of his professional life profoundly. Fol-

lowing this training, and three years of service as

an air force forecaster at bases in Oklahoma and

Alaska, he was released from active duty in 1955.

He remained a member of the Air Force Active

Reserve, retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1974.

Returning to civilian work, Rasmusson

accepted a position as a plant engineer with

Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Co. in Seattle,

Washington. He quickly realized however that

meteorology and not civil engineering had

become his consuming professional interest, so he

resigned this position in 1956 to accept a position

as a U.S. Weather Bureau river forecaster in St.

Louis. His subsequent four years of work in hydrol-

ogy and river forecasting turned out to be a valu-

able asset in his future career in climate research.

It was while working in this position that he met

Georgene Sachtleben, a music teacher, and the

two were married in August 1960. They have four

children. In 1960, he published his first scientific

paper, “Extended Low Flow Forecasting Opera-

tions on the Mississippi River” in the I. A. S. H.

Commission on Surface W

aters Publication, and was

promoted to a state weather forecaster for easter

Missouri and Southern Illinois.

During his eight years in St. Louis, Rasmus-

son took graduate-level night courses at St. Louis

University. Because only engineering and applied

mathematics courses were offered in the night-

school program, he pursued a major in engineer-

ing mechanics, receiving a master’s degree in

1963. A few months later, he was awarded a U.S.

Weather Bureau scholarship to pursue Ph.D.

studies at MIT. Accepting this opportunity, he

studied under one of the premier meteorological

faculties of the time and interacted with a highly

talented group of graduate students. The three

years at MIT marked a shift in his professional

career from operational forecasting to research.

Following receipt of his Ph.D. in meteorol-

ogy in 1966, Rasmusson joined the staff of the

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL)

in Washington, D.C. GFDL was the premier gen-

eral-circulation and climate-modeling laboratory

of the time, and he and his colleague Dr. A. H.

Oort set as their major research project the com-

prehensive documentation of the general circu-

lation of the atmosphere, using the first multiyear

computer database of atmospheric upper-air

observations. Their research culminated in the

publication of a comprehensive monograph, Gen-

Rasmusson, Eugene Martin 137

eral Circulation Statistics, which served as the

internationally known “bible of the general cir-

culation” for more than a decade. It was the pri-

mary information source for a multitude of

empirical studies, as well as the “ground truth”

against which to compare the results of newly

developed global climate mo

dels.

Rasmusson has consistently approached the

problems of climate from a coupled land/ocean/

atmosphere perspective. This broad, interdisci-

plinary approach was already apparent in his

Ph.D. research on the hydrologic cycle of North

America, which broke new ground by analyzing

the surface and atmospheric branches of conti-

nental-scale hydrology not as independent com-

ponents but rather as interacting elements of a

coupled system. This study was in many ways

ahead of its time and has been recognized during

the past two decades as a seminal contribution to

the analysis of continental-scale hydrology. This

approach to hydrologic analysis is now a central

element of the water-balance studies being con-

ducted in several regions of the world as part of

the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment

(GEWEX).

Rasmusson accompanied GFDL in their

move to Princeton University in 1968 but in

1970 returned to Washington. He was asked to

lead a newly formed National Oceanic and

Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) group,

tasked with interpreting the data collected dur-

ing BOMEX, the first large-scale ocean–atmo-

sphere experiment, conducted in 1969 near the

island of Barbados. In recognition of his defini-

tive determination of the fluxes of moisture,

energy, and momentum from ocean to atmo-

sphere over the 500-km-square experimental

array, he was awarded the U.S. Department of

Commerce Silver Medal (1973).

From 1973 to 1979, Rasmusson assumed cru-

cial leadership roles in two major international

programs. He played a major role in the design of

the Global Atmospheric Research Program

(GARP) Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE),

which was undertaken over the eastern tropical

Atlantic to provide data for improving the mod-

eling of convection. As leader of the GATE Con-

vection Subprogram Data Center, he was

responsible for the assembly of observational data

sets for this subprogram and participated in their

analysis. During this period, he also played a

major leadership role in the design and research

activities of the Lake Meteorology Subprogram of

the U.S.–Canadian International Field Year on

the Great Lakes.

In 1979, Rasmusson organized the diagnostic

branch of the newly formed NOAA Climate

Analysis Center and refocused his personal

research efforts on the role of the equatorial

Pacific in climate variability. As chief of the diag-

nostics branch of the center, he initiated a

138 Rasmusson, Eugene Martin

Eugene Martin Rasmusson. Rasmusson’s perceptive

analysis of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO)

phenomenon, which is the largest single source of

interannual global climate variability, brought him

worldwide recognition and provided information

needed for the development of coupled-ocean/

atmosphere-prediction models. (Courtesy of Eugene

Martin Rasmusson)

monthly climate diagnostics bulletin that was the

first internationally circulated summary and eval-

uation of the impacts of current climate anoma-

lies throughout the world. In 1983 he received

the NOAA Administrator’s Award for his anal-

ysis of the catastrophic 1982–83 El Niño/South-

ern Oscillation (ENSO) episode and for his

service to the public and scientific community in

disseminating current information on the evolv-

ing anomalies and their impacts during this major

climate catastrophe.

Rasmusson’s perceptive analysis of the El

Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenome-

non, which is the largest single source of inter-

annual global climate variability, brought him

worldwide recognition and provided informa-

tion needed for the development of coupled

ocean/atmosphere prediction models. This re-

search was also crucial in laying the groundwork

for the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere

Experiment. This was a 10-year (1985–94) pro-

gram element of the World Climate Research

Program to further observe, study, and if possible

predict the ENSO phenomenon. Rasmusson was

one of the intellectual leaders in the conception

and design of this program. In 1989, he received

the Jule Charney Award of the American Mete-

orological Society for his major contributions to

an understanding of this system of climate

anomalies.

Rasmusson retired from NOAA in 1986 to

become a research scientist at the University of

Maryland, where he continued his research and

leadership roles in international programs on cli-

mate variability and global/regional hydrology.

He was instrumental in the development and

research activities of the GEWEX Continental

International Program (GCIP), an experiment

designed to study the large-scale water and energy

balances of the Mississippi Basin. He subse-

quently demonstrated that the North American

warm-season precipitation regime could be

viewed productively in a monsoon-system con-

text. This led to the development of a new inter-

national climate research program focused on

climate and hydrologic variability over North

and South America from a monsoon perspective.

Rasmusson has published seven book chap-

ters and more than 100 scientific papers in a vari-

ety of refereed journals. These include invited

contributions to the journals Nature, Science,

American Scientist, and Climate Change. His book

chapters include a chapter on climatology in the

Handbook of Hydrology and a summary of the lec-

tures he presented on the climate of the 20th

century at the Les Houches 1977 summer school,

Modeling the Earth’s Climate and its Variability. He

has contributed articles to The Encyclopedia of Sci-

ence and T

echnology and its Yearbook and to Sci-

ence Y

ear of the World Book. His publications

include papers and/or book chapters published by

The National Academy Press, the W

orld Mete-

orological Organization, the Pontifical Academy

of Sciences, and the International Rice Institute.

As previously noted, he and his colleague Dr. A.

H. Oort published the first comprehensive mono-

graph on the atmospheric general circulation. He

has published more than 40 papers in conference

and symposia proceedings and has written several

less technical articles directed toward the non-

specialist and the secondary school audience. He

has given scores of lectures to a variety of scien-

tific, nonscientific, and student audiences.

Rasmusson has served the atmospheric sci-

ences profession and the nation through mem-

bership on numerous advisory committees for the

government and the National Research Council.

He was chair of NASA Scientific Steering Group

for the joint U.S.–Japanese Tropical Rainfall

Measurement Mission (TRMM) satellite, which

was launched in 1997. He has served on seven

NRC committees and panels, including the

Board of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and

chair of the Climate Research Committee. In

addition, he has served on six international advi-

sory committees dealing with climate and hydro-

logical experiments.

Rasmusson has also assumed a leadership role

in the American Meteorological Society. He has

been an associate editor and editor of two AMS

Rasmusson, Eugene Martin 139

journals. He was president of the society in 1998.

He has also served on several AMS committees,

as a member of the AMS Council, and as chair of

the AMS Planning Commission. In 2002, he

received the C.F. Brooks Award for service to the

society.

Rasmusson is a Fellow of the American Mete-

orological Society and the American Geophysical

Union. His biographical sketches appear in Amer-

ican Men and W

omen of Science, Who’s Who in the

World, Who’s Who in Technology, and Men of

Accomplishment, among other lexica. Recognition

for his career of resear

ch contributions and scien-

tific leadership activities was capped in 1999 with

his election to the National Academy of Engi-

neering. In addition to the previously noted

awards and recognition, Rasmusson guest lectured

at the Iowa Academy of Science Annual Meet-

ing (1984) and was the first Global Change Lec-

turer at the University of Arizona (1992). In

1994, he presented the annual Victor Starr

Memorial Lecture at MIT, in 1998, he presented

the George Benton Honorary Lecture at Johns

Hopkins University, and was the American

Meteorological Society Horton Lecturer in

Hydrology in 1997. In 2000, Rasmusson became

a research professor emeritus at the University of

Maryland. Although formally retired, he contin-

ues to present lectures to a variety of audiences

and remains active in NRC and AMS activities.

5 Réaumur, René-Antoine Ferchault de

(1683–1757)

French

Philosopher, Naturalist

René de Réaumur was born in La Rochelle,

France, in 1683. After studying mathematics in

Bourges, he moved to Paris in 1703 at age 20 and

under the eye of a relative. Like most scientists of

the time, he made contributions in a number of

areas including meteorology

. His work in mathe-

matics allowed him entrance to the Academy of

Sciences in 1708. Two years later, Réaumur was

put in charge of compiling a description of the

industrial and natural resources in France and, as a

result, developed a broad base view of the sciences.

It also inspired him to invention that led him into

the annals of weather and climate with the inven-

tion of a thermometer and temperature scale.

In 1713, Réaumur made spun glass fibers that

today are the building blocks of Ethernet net-

working and fiber optics and are made of the

same material. A few years later, in 1719, after

observing wasps building nests, he suggested that

paper could be made from wood in response to a

critical shortage of paper-making materials (rags)

at the time. He also was impressed by the geo-

metrical perfection of the beehive’s hexagonal

cells and proposed that they be used as a unit of

measurement.

In 1720, Réaumur developed the first mal-

leable iron, known today as European White-

heart. In his invention, the cupola furnace, he

was perhaps the first to study the microstructure

of iron and steel, showing their grainy structure.

His cupola furnace would become a standard in

iron foundries in the 19th century. He also

improved techniques for making iron and steel,

including tinning iron, and studied gold-bearing

rivers and turquoise mines (showing that some

turquoise was actually fossil teeth).

He turned his interests from steel to temper-

ature and, in 1730, presented to the Paris Aca-

demy his study, “A Guide for the Production of

Thermometers with Comparable Scales.” Réau-

mur wanted to improve the reliability of ther-

mometers based on the work of Guillaume

AMONTONS

, though he appears not to be famil-

iar with

FAHRENHEIT

’s earlier work.

His thermometer of 1731 used a mixture of

alcohol (wine) and water instead of mercury, per-

haps creating the first alcohol thermometer, and

it was calibrated with a scale he created called the

Réaumur scale. This scale had 0° for freezing and

80° for boiling points of water. The scale is no

longer used today; however, most of Europe, with

the exception of the British Isles and Scandi-

navia, adopted his thermometer and scale.

140 Réaumur, René-Antoine Ferchault de

Unfortunately, his errors in the way he fixed

his points were criticized by many in the scientific

community at the time, and even with modifica-

tions in the scale, instrument makers favored

making mercury-based thermometers. Réaumur’s

scale however, lasted for more than a century and,

in some places, well into the late 20th century.

From 1734 to 1742, Réaumur wrote six vol-

umes of Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes

(Memoirs serving as a natural history of insects).

Although unfinished, this work was an important

contribution to entomology

. He also noticed that

crayfish have the ability to regenerate lost limbs

and demonstrated that corals were animals, not

plants. In 1735, he introduced the concept of

growing degree-days, later known as Réaumur’s

Thermal Constant of Phenology. This idea led to

the heat unit system used today to study plant-

temperature relationships.

In 1737, Réaumur became an honorary

member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and

the following year, he became a Fellow of the

Royal Society.

After studying the chemical composition of

Chinese porcelain, in 1740, he formulated his

own Réaumur porcelain. In 1750, while investi-

gating the animal world, he designed an egg incu-

bator. Two years later, in 1752, he discovered that

digestion is a chemical process by isolating gastric

juice and studied its role in food digestion by

studying hawks and dogs.

He died in La Bermondière, on October 18,

1757, and bequeathed to the Academy of Science

his cabinet of natural history with his collections

of minerals and plants.

5 Richard, Philippe

(1953– )

French

Physicist

Philippe Richard was born on November 4, 1953,

in Montélimar, France, to restaurant owners

André Richard and Rose Richard. As a young

boy growing up in Montélimar

, Richard had

interests in astronomy and photography. He

attended the Lycée Alain Borne in Montélimar,

where he earned his B.S. degree in 1972 in engi-

neer electronics and radiocommunications and

an engineering degree in electronics in 1977 from

SUPELEC (Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité) in

Paris. He then attended Stanford University for

graduate studies and received an M.S. in atmo-

spherics and space physics in 1978.

Richard has 20 years’ experience in the light-

ning-detection and thunderstorm-forecasting

business. He was first published in 1985 in Radio

Science, a paper entitled “VHF-UHF interfer

metric measurements, applications to lightning

discharge mapping,” which described the inter-

ferometric technology design for mapping light-

ning discharges. Richard started his thunderstorm

careers in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the

French National Aerospace Research Institute

ONERA by diving into the research of the physics

of intracloud electricity and lightning strikes. He

designed real-time, long-range, interferometric

technology for localization and monitoring of

total lightning activity of thunderstorms (called

SAFIR technology) between 1984 and 1988.

Total lightning activity (cloud and cloud-to-

ground lightning), produced by thunderstorm

cells, provides a new type of information on thun-

derstorms developments; it can be correlated to

severe thunderstorm phenomena such as intense

rainfall or downbursts/microbursts and is comple-

mentary to other real-time weather data (weather

radar, satellite) in improving thunderstorm now-

casting. Nowcasting is short-term weather fore-

casts, typically for less than the next six hours; in

the case of thunderstorms it rarely goes beyond 30

minutes to one hour. The SAFIR systems are net-

works for lightning localization that have a

national, countrywide coverage. The system com-

prises interferometric VHF detection stations

located in various parts of the observed area, con-

nected into a detection network and a central

processing system, and is accessible through a PC.

The SAFIR system displays the total lightning

Richard, Philippe 141

activity and density on a map of the selected area,

and thunderstorm cells and hazard areas can also

be tracked. Finally, the user has a nowcast of the

thunderstorm as well as automatic warnings avail-

able in real time.

All of his near dozen publications deal with

lightning research, and he has been recognized

for his work by receiving the Blondel Award,

French Society of Electrical Engineers (1994);

French Air Space Academy “Grand Prix” Award

(2000) and Montgolfier Award; and French

National Industry Association (2002). In 2002,

he married Antje Kruse from Rendsburg, Ger-

many, formerly in international sales.

He continues to make contributions in

weather and science by making total lightning-

detection technology available to meteorologists.

He is currently the general manager of the Thun-

derstorm Business Unit for Vaisala GAI in Ari-

zona. Vaisala develops, manufactures, and markets

electronic measurement systems and equipment

for meteorology, environmental sciences, traffic

safety, and industry.

5 Richardson, Lewis Fry

(1881–1953)

English

Mathematician

Lewis Richardson was born on October 11, 1881,

in Newcastle upon T

yne, Northumberland, Eng-

land, to a family of tanners and Quakers. As a

youth, he attended the Newcastle Preparatory

School where he studied, among other things, the

works of Euclid. From 1894 to 1898, he went to

school in York and then spent two years in New-

castle at the Durham College of Science studying

mathematics and science. He received a degree

in natural science at King’s College in Cambridge

in 1903. In 1926, Richardson was awarded a

Ph.D. in physics from the University of London

and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

In 1929, he was given a bachelor’s degree in psy-

chology at the University of London.

Richardson first worked at the National Phys-

ical Laboratory (NPL, 1903–04), then taught at

the University College Aberystwyth (1905–06),

and became a chemist for the National Peat

Industries (1906–07) before returning to the NPL

(1907–09). In 1909, he married Dorothy Garnett,

whose father William was assistant to James Clerk

MAXWELL

and later became head of the physical

and chemical laboratory of the Sunbeam Lamp

Company (1909–12). Richardson took a position

at the Manchester College of Technology

(1912–13) and then moved on to the meteoro-

logical office at the company’s Eskdalemuir Ob-

servatory (1913–16) and its office at Benson,

Oxfordshire (1919–1920). From 1920 to 1929 he

headed the physics department at Westminster

Training College, and from 1929 to 1940, he was

principal of Paisley College of Technology in

Scotland.

Richardson was the first scientist to apply

mathematics, in particular the method of finite

differences, to predicting the weather. Richardson

tried a radically different approach to forecasting,

using as his starting point a system of fundamen-

tal physical principles governing atmospheric

motion. He put together mathematical equations

that represented these principles and developed

a mathematical method of calculating them. He

predicted that if he started from the state of the

atmosphere at a particular time—with the initial

conditions—his method could be used to work

out its future conditions. He carried out two years

of manual calculations, much of it in the Cham-

pagne district of France, where he served as an

ambulance driver for the Friends Ambulance Unit

in France as a conscientious objector during

World War I (1916–19). However, he used an

unrealistic value in the changes in pressure and

winds at two locations in central Europe during a

six-hour period, and the results were disastrous.

Nevertheless, he published the results in his

remarkable Weather Prediction by Numerical Pro-

cess in 1922 and is considered the father of numer-

ical weather prediction (NWP). It was not until

the 1950s when John von

NEUMANN

and Jule

142 Richardson, Lewis Fry

Gregory

CHARNEY

used computers successfully

that numerical forecasting became a reality. In ret-

rospect, meteorologists contend that Richardson’s

math was fine, and much of prediction today is

carried out similarly to his; he just had bad data.

Today, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process is

considered one of the most important books in

the field.

Richardson proposed a computing theater

with 64,000 human computers to forecast the

whole planet, but he considered his proposal

impractical and called it a fantasy

, purely science

fiction. In 1975, Nigerian-born Philip Emeagwali,

a mathematician and computer scientist, took

Richardson’s idea and created the 64,000 Hyper-

Ball international network of hypercube comput-

ers with 64 binary thousand processors to perform

the world’s fastest computation. He designed his

network forecast weather and track global warm-

ing, but it was ignored by most scientists.

Another application of mathematics by Rich-

ardson, a pacifist, was in his study of the causes of

war, no doubt influenced by his experiences as an

ambulance driver. In 1919, he self-published

Mathematical Psychology of War, dedicated to his

ambulance colleagues, because he found no pub-

lisher willing to print it. He had better luck with

Generalized Foreign Politics (1939), Arms and Inse-

curity (1949), and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels

(1950). Unfortunately for him, his conclusions

ended up opposite of what he believed—that war

was inevitable.

According to Philip J. Davis, professor emer-

itus of applied mathematics at Brown University:

“To numerical analysts, Richardson is known for

his algorithms for the numerical solution (in pre-

computer days) of ordinary and partial dif

feren-

tial equations. The terms jury problem for elliptic

equations and marching problems for hyperbolic

equations come from him. The Richardson

“deferred approach to the limit, [that is, a method

for the acceleration of convergence] is funda-

mental and widely employed.”

He made contributions to the calculus and to

the theory of diffusion, in particular eddy-diffu-

sion in the atmosphere. Atmospheric modelers

generally treat atmospheric mixing as a macro-

scopic eddy-diffusion process. He was not happy

about his research on the flow of air being used

by the military in the dispersal of poison gases.

The Richardson number, a fundamental

quantity involving gradients of temperature and

wind velocity, is named for him. In turbulence

theory, it characterizes the fraction of turbulent

energy that comes from temperature gradients, as

opposed to wind velocity gradients.

He produced 117 publications and 10 unpub-

lished works. He died on September 30, 1953, in

Kilmun, Argyll, Scotland. In 1972, the Richard-

son Wing of the headquarters of the British Mete-

orological Office was opened in his honor.

Richardson’s many work experiences tossed

between chemistry and meteorology, but it was

his works in mathematics and pacifism that he

has made the biggest impact.

5 Rossby, Carl-Gustaf Arvid

(1898–1957)

Swedish/American

Meteorologist

Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby was born on December

28, 1898, in Stockholm, Sweden, to an engineer

and graduated from Stockholm University where

he obtained a doctorate in 1925. Rossby was a

disciple of the Bergen School of Meteorology

founded by Vilhelm

BJERKNES

In 1926, he came to the United States on a

Scandinavian–American fellowship to the U.S.

Weather Bureau but left Washington on comple-

tion to establish the first airways meteorological

network in California, funded by Harry Guggen-

heim. While at the Weather Bureau, Rossby

became aquainted with Francis W. Reichelderfer,

who also knew Guggenheim, and was a believer

in the Bjerknes Bergen School of Meteorology.

The weather bureau was reluctant to accept the

air-mass method of forecasting that was devel-

oped in the Bergen School.

Rossby, Carl-Gustaf Arvid 143