Reflections: A Memoir

It was not until this memoir was well underway that I fully appreciated why I had to do it. As the remaining years dwindled away, I got a yearning to take stock of the 56 years that I have spent as a meteorologist. I needed to take a retrospective look while my memory still served me, with the perspective of one who has seen the evolution of the discipline in general and of radar meteorology in particular. From this view at the apex of the remarkable scientific developments of the second half of the twentieth century, I wondered how the work that my colleagues and I had done in a seemingly helter-skelter fashion fitted into a coherent picture of the present state of the art. I also thought it would be fun to relive the exquisite joys I have experienced as a researcher and to reevaluate some of the painful periods.

I am the third child born to Rose (Jaffee) Atlas and Isadore Atlas, immigrants from Russia and Poland, respectively. My mother, one of six children, worked at a sewing machine in a New York factory from the age of 12 and never finished grade school. My father came to the United States with an uncle in 1912 at the age of 16, worked in a ladies’ hat factory, and finished high school at night. Except for his sister Esther, who immigrated to Mexico City in 1928 and made contact with him in 1942, my father never again saw his parents or siblings. My parents were married in 1917. My brother Moe was born in 1918, my sister Mae was born two years later, and I came along in 1924.

Upon graduation from radar school in April 1945, I was assigned to the newly formed All Weather Flying Division (AWFD) at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio to do research and development (R&D) on weather radar for flight safety. The rest of my class was assigned to set up APQ-13 (airborne) radars to be used as ground-based systems for storm detection at various Air Corps bases. (The radar names were symbolic of their function: A = Airborne, P = Pulse, and Q = Special purpose, in this case, bombing.) The prior class had been assigned to fly B-29 weather reconnaissance out of Guam and Tinian in the Pacific on long missions to Japan. My assignment was a stroke of luck for it put me into a position where I was to get an early taste of research and to come into close contact with the scientific community.

In October 1948, a few weeks after my marriage, I joined the Geophysics Research Directorate (GRD) of the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories (AFCRL) as chief of the Weather Radar Branch. A comprehensive account of weather radar at GRD has been presented by Metcalf and Glover (9), so I shall not dwell on technical details. Suffice it to say that we covered many of the facets of the field during my 18-year tenure there. Members of the Weather Branch during that period included Vernon Plank, Wilbur Paulsen, Harold Banks, Ralph Donaldson, Edwin Kessler, Keith Browning, Albert Chmela, Ken Glover, Ken Hardy, Pio Petrocchi, Roger Lhermitte, Roland Boucher, and a number of key visitors (Plate 3). Although not a member of our staff, Raymond Wexler (Harry Wexler’s brother) spent most of his time at our laboratory (Plate 4).

In view of the considerable institutional support that the Weather Radar Branch was receiving at AFCRL, the array of experimental tools at our disposal, and the flexibility we had to pursue our interests, it is perhaps surprising that I should have moved to the University of Chicago. A number of factors converged at the time to instigate the move. No one of these was decisive alone.

We arrived in Boulder in late August of 1972 and moved into an apartment at Remington Post at 30th St. and the “Diagonal” to Longmont in early September until we could decide whether or not to remain permanently. My new office was located at 30th and Arapaho so that it was a pleasant bike ride each way. I was to replace Dan Rex. My deputies were Charlie Palmer and Harry Vaughan.

My election to president-elect of the AMS in 1974 and president in 1975 was a mixed blessing because of the traumatic year I was to experience as NHRE director in 1975. I had previously served on the Council of the AMS in 1962–1964 and 1972–1974 and found it an enjoyable and rewarding experience. In the earlier period, it was a special pleasure to meet and work with some of the old-timers in the field such as Pettersson, Neiberger, Tom Malone, “Shorty” Orville (father of Harry and Dick Orville), Verner Suomi, Lou Battan, John Beckman, and many others. Later, it was leaders like Pat McTaggart-Cowan from Canada, Dave Johnson, Joe Smagorinsky, Dick Reed, Will Kellogg, Werner Baum, and Earl Droessler.

During the summer of 1976, while I was recuperating from the NHRE fiasco, I had two visitors from NASA: first Bill Nordberg, director of the Applications Directorate of Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), and then Bob Cooper, the Goddard director. Bill was there to recruit me to head the severe storm program at GSFC. Both were dynamic personalities, friendly and enthusiastic. Nordberg made a fine pitch; both NASA and the job looked very attractive. I was later overwhelmed to find that he was suffering from an inoperable brain tumor to which he succumbed just a few months later. A couple of weeks after Nordberg’s visit Cooper came by to make an even more enticing offer—to establish a broad-based atmospheric and oceanic science laboratory. He also made the unprecedented commitment to permit us to hire without limit—a promise that he made on the bold assumption that he could sell the idea to NASA headquarters. To my amazement, he did. At the time, I was also entertaining an offer to head the Atmospheric Science Division at NSF. After considerable thought and confidential discussions with my colleagues, I accepted the NASA offer and arrived at Greenbelt, Maryland in January 1977, simultaneous with the start of the Carter administration. Lucille was anxious for the move back to the East Coast because she wanted to be close to her mother. Our move was also a stroke of good fortune because Lucille had a malignancy that had been misdiagnosed in Boulder but was surgically cured in Maryland. Here is a life-and-death case of serendipity.

My official retirement from NASA was dated 3 December 1984. On that day, I started employment as a distinguished visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. That was the beginning of visits to Pasadena for one to two months each year. During the period from April 1985 to July 1987 I was also a senior research associate at the Department of Meteorology, University of Maryland, where I had grants from both the NSF and NASA. Lucille and I started to spend three to four months in southern Florida, starting in 1989, when I also worked part-time with Frank Marks at the Hurricane Research Division of the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) and the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (CIMAS) at the University of Miami. The period 1986–1990 was also devoted in large part to the planning and organization of the Battan Memorial and 40th Anniversary Radar Meteorology Conference, and the editing of the resulting book Radar in Meteorology. During the entire period, I retained an office at Goddard Space Flight Center.

The first conference on radar meteorology was a small informal meeting held at MIT on 14 March 1947. We did not know at that time that there would be others, so it was not known as the “first.” By 1986, we had held 23 conferences spaced about 21 months apart on average. Rogers and Smith (2) provide an interesting commentary on the important role of these conferences in stimulating progress in the field and setting the style for AMS meetings in all other specialties.

Another chapter of my life after NASA concerns the invention and patent on a method of using the conventional airport surveillance radar (ASR-9) to detect hazardous low-level wind shear (131). Prior to mid-1988, wind shear had been responsible for twelve major aircraft accidents, seven of which resulted in the loss of 575 lives. Thus, wind shear detection and warning was high on the FAA’s priority list of critical problems. Westinghouse Electric, the company responsible for the development of the ASR-9, called me in to discuss the possibility of upgrading the radar to include a wind shear detection capability. I was impressed with the list of distinguished company radar experts at our first meeting on September 19, 1985. But it soon became clear that they had not the slightest idea of how one might approach the problem. Neither did I at that point. The essential obstacle was the fact that the antenna radiated two wide vertical fan beams, one tilted slightly above the other. These beams would therefore detect all the precipitation over a broad altitude range, whereas it was necessary to measure only the Doppler velocities and wind shear at the lower levels where the aircraft were flying during takeoff and landing. After several hours of discussion, none of us had any concept of how to proceed. Nevertheless, I agreed to think about the problem and get back to them later to sign a consulting agreement.

Here I shall indulge myself with a bit of scientific philosophy. I do not take credit for these ideas, for they come from those who have devoted far more thought to the subject than I. However, I have assembled a few of the more profound concepts in a paper that I presented as part of the first remote sensing lecture of the AMS in Paris in 1991 (135). Perhaps the entire article will convey the intensity of my feelings for the subject, but the following selections stand on their own.

When the experiences of 56 years are compressed into some 150 pages, one sees his life in accelerated time lapse. I find it difficult to conceive of all that has been packed into those years—the various positions I’ve held, the wide range of research that we have undertaken, the thrills of discovery, the pure wonder of how it all comes together, the excitement of telling the world about it, the heartwarming recognition by one’s peers, the sweetness of working with inspiring colleagues, the pleasures of seeing your protégés make their own mark in the world of science, and making friends around the globe. What exquisite joy! What a magical adventure! The frustrations of fighting the bureaucracy and having one’s proposals and manuscripts rejected from time to time pale by comparison.