Joseph Smagorinsky

Joseph Smagorinsky (29 January 1924 - 21 September 2005)

Joseph Smagorinsky (29 January 1924 - 21 September 2005) was an American meteorologist and the first director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. Joseph Smagorinsky was born to Nathan Smagorinsky and Dina Azaroff. His parents were from Gomel, Belarus, which they left during the pogroms during the early 20th Century. Nathan and Dina bore three sons in Gomel: Jacob (who died as an infant), David (b. 1903), and Samuel (b. 1907). In 1913, Nathan emigrated from the coast of Finland to New York city, where he set up a business painting signs in the Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In 1916, with the business established, Dina, Sam, and David emigrated by going to Murmansk (or Archangel) and then southward along the Norwegian coast to Christiana (now Oslo) and getting on a boat to New York where they joined Nathan. They had two other children: Hillel (Harry) (b. 1919) and Joseph (b. 1924). Like his three brothers, Joseph worked in their father’s sign-painting business throughout his youth. Sam, David, and Harry stayed in the painting business, with Harry eventually developing Nathan’s sign-painting business into a hardware store. Joseph attended Stuyvesant High School for Math and Science in Manhattan. When he expressed an interest in going to college, the family had a meeting in which they discussed the possibility, and upon agreeing, made plans on how to afford Joseph’s education. Joseph went on to earn his BS (1947), MS (1948), and PhD (1953) at New York University. In addition, while a cadet in the U. S. Army during World War II, he was sent to Brown and M.I.T. for courses in meteorology. During the war he flew in the front of bombers, making weather forecasts based on visible factors such as the size of waves.

Following the war, Smagorinsky concluded his studies. He originally aspired to be a naval architect, but was not admitted to the Naval Academy. He believed that his mother’s lack of immediate U. S. citizenship, coupled with the Red Scare following World War II, contributed to his denial of admission. He then turned to meteorology as a career and educational focus. As a doctoral student he attended a lecture on weather forecasting conducted by John von Neumann, and asked a series of pointed questions during the question-and-answer session following the talk. Later, von Neumann confided to his colleague Jule Charney that he was becoming disillusioned with the young scholar he’d taken on as his protégé, and wished that he knew the name of the young cadet asking all those questions following his lecture. Charney revealed that he knew young Joseph Smagorinsky and could put them together. Charney, a prominent atmospheric scientist, invited Smagorinsky to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study to examine the predictability of large-scale motions in the middle troposphere (the lower part of the atmosphere) using the only supercomputer in existence at the time. Smagorinsky moved to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton to work with von Neumann on the development of a radical new approach to weather forecasting that employed the new technology of the computer.

Before the advent of computers in the late 1940s, weather forecasting was very crude. George Platzman of the University of Chicago felt that “academic meteorology in this country is still suffering from the trade-school blues.” The American Meteorological Society and its leaders, most of whom taught in universities, still aspired to turn meteorology into a professional discipline given the same respect accorded engineering and the physical sciences. A mathematician by trade, von Neumann was the first to see the potential afforded by computers for much faster processing of data and thus more responsive weather forecasting. He was not satisfied with mathematics as an abstract practice, and weather forecasting provided him with a very concrete application of mathematical principles in conjunction with the new computer technology that made mathematics a much faster and more complex phenomenon. At the Institute for Advanced Study, he used his mathematical knowledge and his facility with computers, and Smagorinsky contributed his understanding of meteorology, to develop a new approach called models-based forecasting. This approach relied on data collected from weather balloons. The data were then fed into computers and subjected to the laws of physics, enabling forecasts of how turbulence, water, heat, and other factors would interact to produce weather patterns. (Smagorinsky endeared himself to his children by visiting their elementary school classrooms to demonstrate how weather balloons worked.)

Smagorinsky’s early expertise was in turbulence. In his doctoral dissertation, conducted at NYU under the direction of Bernhard Haurwitz, he examined the processes taking place when wind comes over a mountain. Ultimately, he developed what became known as the Eddy Viscosity Theory, which has been taken up in many disciplines that involve physics.

Following his apprenticeship and work with von Neumann, in 1953, at age 29, Smagorinsky accepted a position at the U.S. Weather Bureau and was among the pioneers of the Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit. Serving in a variety of positions with the Weather Bureau in Washington from 1953 to 1955, he tested and refined weather models. Based on this experience, in 1955 he was selected to head the newly formed General Circulation Research Section in order to create a simple model of the atmosphere’s general circulation and reproduce its salient features. The section was renamed the General Circulation Research Laboratory in 1959 and then renamed again as the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in 1963. The lab moved to its current home at Princeton University in 1968, which Smagorinsky directed till his retirement in January, 1983. Among Dr. Smagorinsky’s many skills was attracting talented scientists to the staff of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. Two of them were climate modeler Syukuro Manabe and ocean modeler Kirk Bryan, who spearheaded the development of the first climate model in 1969–a general circulation model that took into account the interactions of oceans and atmosphere. By the end of the next decade, general circulation models emerged as a central tool in climate research. Other researchers who worked under Smagorinsky’s direction in Washington and Princeton included Mario Orlanski, Kurihara, Miyakoda, Rod Graham, Jerry Nemias, Leith Holloway, Isaac Held, Garreth Williams, Doug Lilly, and others. Developing this first climate model was based on Dr. Smagorinsky’s belief that only a completely new approach to scientific endeavor–departing from the independent, individual mode of inquiry–would produce answers to extremely complex problems. He realized that it would take large-scale numerical modeling with teams of scientists using commonly shared high-speed computers for experiments, to achieve such a breakthrough. As stated in a 1992 bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, “Dr. Smagorinsky’s almost relentless pursuit of excellence at Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory set a standard for other laboratories and centers that have contributed immensely to the growth of meteorology as a science” throughout the world. Dr. Smagorinsky was among the earliest researchers who sought to exploit new methods of numerical weather prediction to extend forecasting past one, or at most two, days. He published a seminal paper in 1963 on his research using primitive equations of atmospheric dynamics to simulate the atmosphere’s circulation. This paper fundamentally changed the approach to modeling physical processes that drive climate and weather. He extended early weather models to include variables such as wind, cloud cover, precipitation, atmospheric pressure and radiation emanating from the earth and sun. Later, with colleagues Douglas Lilly and James Deardorff, both at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, he developed large-eddy simulation, the first practical technique to account for atmospheric turbulence in numerical models.

Among his professional achievements are: • Chair, Global Atmospheric Research Program, coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization and the International Council of Scientific Unions • Gold medal, U. S. Department of Commerce • Sigma Xi Society • Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences • Member of the Presidential Scientific Advisory Committee Panel on Pollution • Member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Atmospheric Science. • Buys Ballot Gold Medal 1974 (awarded once each decade by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for outstanding advances in the field of meteorology) • IMO prize and Gold medal, World Meteorological Organization 1974 • Meisinger award 1967 • Rossby Research Gold medal 1972 • Cleveland Abbe award for distinguished service to atmospheric sciences 1980 • Presidential award 1980 • Symons memorial gold medal, Royal Meteorological Society, 1981 • The Scientific Research Society national lecturer from 1983 to 1985 • President, American Meteorological Society 1986 • International Meteorological Organization Prize from the World Meteorological Organization in 1988 • Honorary doctorate, University of Munich • Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth Science from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 2003, presented to Smagorinsky and his friend Norman Phillips for "their seminal and pioneering studies" that led to "an understanding of the general circulation of the atmosphere, including transports of heat and moisture that determine the earth's climate." • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recognition as one of the ten most significant figures in NOAA’s history, and identification of his general circulation climate model as one of the three most important breakthroughs in meteorology in the last 200 years.

Smagorinsky was married to Margaret Francis Elizabeth Knoepfel from May 29, 1948 to his death at age 81 on September 21, 2005. They met while taking classes at NYU, where Margaret was preparing for a career as a meteorological statistician. The couple had two wedding ceremonies. One was a Catholic ceremony at mother's insistence; the other was a civil ceremony in the Georgetown garden of Judge Fay Bently. (Judge Bently was later removed from the bench, declared incompetent, and confined to a mental hospital.) This ceremony was attended by just the required 2 witnesses, Jerry Moss and Alice Williams. Joseph and Margaret considered this smaller gathering to be their official wedding, given the ways in which his Jewish family and her Catholic family opposed the union. Following their marriage, Margaret abandoned her career to raise their five children, Anne, Peter, Teresa, Julia, and Frederick.

 [edit] External links

• Joseph Smagorinsky: Visionary in Numerical Weather Prediction and Climate Modeling. Web pages recognising Smagorinsky as one of NOAA's Top Ten History Makers • Pioneering meteorologist Smagorinsky dies - Princeton University obituary • Weather By Numbers - Mr. Wizard Studios feature on numerical weather prediction, highlighting Smagorinsky's work.