By STEPHEN MILLER
Joanne Simpson helped show how hurricanes draw their power from warm seas. Armed with that knowledge, she set out to destroy one by sending a payload of silver iodide into the heart of a storm. Ms. Simpson, who died March 4 at age 86, didn't have much success suppressing storms. But her discoveries about the nature of clouds and the formation and dynamics of hurricanes were some of the most significant in 20th century meteorology.
USAToday
Believed to be the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in meteorology, Ms. Simpson overcame significant professional barriers for women and become chief scientist for meteorology at NASA's Earth Sciences Directorate.
The daughter of a Boston newspaperman friendly with Charles Lindbergh, Ms. Simpson worked at Boston Airport and became a pilot in her teens. Flying among the clouds spurred her interest in the weather. She won a scholarship to the University of Chicago to study meteorology and taught forecasting to aviators during World War II. She went on to earn a master's degree at Chicago, but the department refused to give her a fellowship to go on for a doctorate, despite high marks.
It is still difficult to comprehend the level of bias built into the system half a century and more; that change is for the better, to scrub bias out of academia.
"They told me it was totally inappropriate for a woman to be a meteorologist," Ms. Simpson told USA Today in 1998. She persevered, teaching to support herself and studying with Swedish meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby. He advised her to concentrate on clouds, then an unpopular topic in the field that he deemed a fitting subject "for a little girl to study."
Imagine: even someone who supported her called her a little girl. A look at his biography does not show her name.
Despite holding a series of prestigious appointments, Ms. Simpson blamed sexism for holding back her career, especially rules against nepotism that prevented her from being hired by the same institutions that employed her first two husbands.In the 1950s, Ms. Simpson worked at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where she began studying how clouds develop into hurricanes. Her research involved riding in a surplus Navy PBY Catalina "flying boat," often into storms. She developed some of the first mathematical models of clouds, using a slide rule for calculations. Later, she pioneered computers to model weather.
Se pioneered the use of computers. I also found an article from the publication Meteorogical Monographs about her research.
Ms. Simpson's research resulted in what became known as the "hot tower" theory of storm formation, which showed how hurricanes derive energy from heat generated within cumulonimbus clouds that reach to the stratosphere. "This timid-looking blonde is in fact one of the top five meteorologists in the world, and besides her hurricane research runs a big home in Woods Hole, Mass., does all the cooking for her husband and two sons, and is an expert at most sports," the Associated Press reported in a 1958 profile.
But she later contradicted that idyllic portrayal of her personal life, which she said had suffered from her professional activities. After two divorces, she married Robert Simpson, also a meteorologist and later head of the National Hurricane Center. Together, they worked on a joint Navy/Weather Bureau project called Project Stormfury that sought to slow hurricanes by bombing them with silver iodide, used in cloud-seeding. The experiments came to little, though when they seeded Hurricane Beulah in 1963, the storm's eye faded and winds dropped.
Ms. Simpson continued cloud-seeding experiments as director of experimental meteorology for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1979, she moved to NASA, where for the first time in her career she worked with other women scientists.
"This was something new in my career, to find three or four other scientists in the ladies room," she said in the USA Today interview. Bathroom facilities played a surprisingly prominent role in her career, often keeping her off planes that didn't have women's facilities.At NASA, Ms. Simpson undertook what she considered her most ambitious project, directing satellite measurements of rainfall across the tropics. Discoveries from that project have demonstrated how dust and smoke influence rainfall, and also how Atlantic hurricanes are born.
Ms. Simpson didn't quite achieve her goal of never retiring, but she used retirement to take a swipe at global-warming theorists, whose dire predictions she felt were over-reliant on computer models.
"We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system," she wrote in a conference paper in 2008. "We only need to watch the weather forecasts."
Remembrances - Wall Street Journal March 12, 2010
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