Smagorinsky, Joseph (1924–2005)

AMERICAN METEOROLOGIST AND the first director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), Joseph Smagorinsky developed influential methods for predicting weather and climate conditions and lectured at Princeton for many years. With his decision to move the GFDL to Princeton, Smagorinsky made the university a leading center for the study of global warming.

Joseph Smagorinsky was born to Nathan Smagorinsky and Dina Azaroff. His parents were from Gomel, Belarus, but fled during the pogroms. Sma-gorinsky's father was the first to immigrate to the United States in 1913, settling in Manhattans Lower East Side, where he opened a paint store. Three years later, he was joined by his wife and their children. Joseph was born on January 29, 1924, when the family was already living in the United States. Similar to his other three brothers, he worked in his father's paint store. He attended Stuyvesant High School for Math and Science in Manhattan. After high school, he expressed his wish not to stay in the family business and to go to college instead. As his intellectual skills had already become apparent, the whole family decided to support him in his decision. Smagorinsky earned his B.S. (1947), M.S. (1948), and Ph.D. (1953) at New York University. During his sophomore year there, he joined the Air Force and became a member of an elite group of recruits who had been selected for their talents in mathematics and physics. Because of his scientific interests, Smagorinsky was included in the Air Force meteorology program. As a part of the scheme, he was sent to Brown University to specialize in mathematics and physics for six months. Smagorinsky was then sent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to learn dynamical meteorology, under Ed Lorenz, the author of chaos theory. During World War II, Smagorinsky worked as a weather observer for the Air Force. In May 1948, Smagorinsky married Margaret Frances Elizabeth Knoepfel—one of the first female weather statisticians.

After the war, Smagorinsky concluded his studies. Although he had planned a career as a naval architect, the rejection of the Webb Institute led him to choose meteorology as a field. After a question-and-answer session with prominent Princeton meteorologist Jule Charney, Smagorinsky was invited to carry out the research for his doctoral dissertation at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. In 1950, Smagorinsky was part of Charney's team of scientists who successfully solved Charney's equations on the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, also known as ENIAC. This was a milestone event in modern meteorology, as it pioneered the use of computers for weather forecasting. At the Institute for Advanced Studies, Smagorinsky and Charney developed the technique of the so-called numerical weather prediction. This technique relied on data collected by weather balloon, which were then elaborated by computers according to the laws of physics. This enabled researchers to forecast the interaction of turbulence, water, heat, and other factors in the production of weather patterns.

After completing his doctorate, in 1953 Smagorinsky accepted a position at the U.S. Weather Bureau and was among the founders of the Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit. Two years later, at the suggestion of eminent meteorologist John von Neumann, the U.S. Weather Bureau created a General Circulation Research Section and appointed Smagorinsky to direct it. Smagorinsky conceived his task as the completion of the von Neumann/Charney computer modeling program. He wanted to obtain a three-dimensional, global, primitive-equation gen-eral [Page 903]circulation model of the atmosphere. The section was initially located in Suitland, Maryland, but was moved to Washington, D.C., where it was renamed the General Circulation Research Laboratory in 1959. In 1963, it became the GFDL before moving to Princeton University, where it is still located, in 1968. Smagorinsky continued to serve as director of the lab until his retirement in January 1983.

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