Letter From Headquarters

The Increasing Importance of the AMS Summer Community Meeting

hen the AMS Council established the Commis- versity, 9–12 August (see the AMS Web site for more sion on the Weather and Climate Enterprise, information). The program for this meeting is, again, W the hope was that it might help lessen the one that will address head-on some of the most im- tensions between the government and private sec- portant topics facing our community. The overarching tors in the delivery of weather and climate products theme is “weather and climate risks.” As stated in the by providing a neutral venue for discussion. It was an meeting materials: experiment, in a sense, to see if the convening power of the AMS could bring together the key individuals One of the biggest challenges faced by our across the sectors for fruitful interaction that might Enterprise is utilizing the vast amount of data yield better cooperation. and information we have accumulated to assist As anyone who has followed its evolution knows, in making the most difficult decisions businesses the Enterprise Commission has far exceeded expecta- and society face in some of the most critical tions. Through regular meetings that address key issues situations. At stake are hundreds of billions of impacting all sectors of the community, real progress dollars and the safety of countless lives. Are we, has been made in having the government, private, and as an Enterprise, prepared to effectively rise to academic sectors work collaboratively to ensure the the challenges? weather and climate enterprise serves the public in the best possible manner. The meeting will cover risk assessment, as well as Critical to this success has been a Summer Com- decision-making tools and products that are becom- munity Meeting organized by the Board on Enterprise ing available to address user needs. Sessions will also Communication within the Commission. The first of cover ongoing initiatives, such as the efforts to achieve these meetings, held in Boulder in 2005, was tense a Nationwide Network of Networks for observations and at times contentious. Still, dialogue occurred, and ways the enterprise can provide useful support for and as participants began learning more about the the rapidly growing renewable energy industry. concerns—and operational constraints—of their In just a few short years, the Summer Community colleagues across sector divides, tensions eased a bit. Meeting has succeeded in making our entire enter- Building on this initial success, the Summer Community prise more productive and valuable to the nation. If Meeting has quickly become one of the key events you can attend this meeting, I am sure you will not of the year for leaders throughout the enterprise to be disappointed in the experience, and that you will discuss ways for the sectors to work together for the quickly become one of many who now view the Sum- common good. Last year’s meeting at the National mer Community Meeting as a “must attend” event Weather Center on the University of Oklahoma cam- each year. pus included discussions in areas such as observational networks, renewable energy, and climate services, and resulted in progress on several key initiatives for the community. This year’s Summer Community Meeting is being Ke i t h L. Se i t t e r , CCM held on the campus of The Pennsylvania State Uni- Ex e c u t i v e Di r e c t o r

AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY July 2010 | 937 Obituaries

oanne Simpson died on 4 March 2010, after a air from the environment, was—thanks to Rossby— lifelong career that changed the way we look at run on a computer in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1955. J clouds and deepened our understanding of tropi- In 1958, she and Riehl published their seminal pa- cal and hurricanes. She was a pio- per on how “hot towers” maintained the atmospheric neer in the use of aircraft, computer modeling, and general circulation in weather modification, and taught many of us much the tropics, resolving Joanne Simpson about the atmosphere. Starting by becoming the first an apparent paradox. 1923–2010 woman to obtain a Ph.D. in meteorology in 1949, she Researchers knew that blazed a trail for future women in the field both by the upper tropical at- example and by lowering barriers, making the path mosphere was losing heat to space, and that this heat easier to travel. Men as well as women benefited from had to be maintained by transport from the tropical her mentoring, collaboration, and enthusiasm. boundary layer in the familiar upward branch of the Joanne Gerould was born on 23 March 1923 in Hadley cell. Yet there was an energy minimum in Boston, the daughter of two journalists. Her father the middle troposphere. So the simple idea of heat introduced her to sailing and flying, which sparked transport by upward advection could not be correct. an interest in clouds and later led to her They reasoned that the heat transport was enrolling in a course in meteorology taught taking place, but in the protected cores of by Carl-Gustaf Rossby while she was an deep tropical clouds associated with heavy undergraduate at the University of Chi- rains and thunderstorms across the Trop- cago. After she got her bachelor’s degree ics, which would have been missed in the in 1943, Joanne contributed to the war measurements of the energy profile. effort by teaching “war courses” to future Joanne started working on weather military forecasters, both at Chicago and modification while still at UCLA (1960– . She received her M.S. 64); this work continued while she headed in 1945, with Rossby as her advisor. NOAA’s Experimental Meteorology Labo- A class by Herbert Riehl reignited her Joanne Simpson ratory (1965–74). This research took her in interest in clouds, which became the topic two complementary directions, working of her Ph.D., with Riehl as her advisor. She spent on cumulus clouds as well as hurricanes. She seeded the summers working at Woods Hole with Bernard cumulus clouds at first to understand better how they Haurwitz, Henry Stommel, and Alfred Woodcock, would be affected, but later to look at their impact on using aircraft data from the Wyman-Woodcock ex- precipitation. She developed a one-dimensional cloud pedition in the Caribbean. In 1949, she received her model to assess the effect of seeding on the growth Ph.D., studying the interaction of tropical cumulus of individual cumulus towers. While the seeding with their environment and their relationship to appeared to increase the cloud heights significantly, tropical waves. the effects of seeding on rainfall were ambiguous. In While at Woods Hole, she developed the first the 1960s and 1970s, Joanne and her husband, Bob, numerical model of a cumulus cloud. Joanne’s early worked hard to establish the capacity to test their hy- work relied on observations in the Caribbean using an pothesis that selective cloud seeding just outside the instrumented PBY aircraft on loan for the U.S. Navy. eye wall would temporarily weaken tropical cyclones. Her ideas of how a cumulus cloud worked differed It was a visionary concept that promised to change significantly from those developed by Richard Scorer the way we respond to the hurricane threat. While and Frank Ludlum of Imperial College, London. seeding results did not work out in either case, the Their differences, reflected both in the literature of experiments led us to understand much more about the time and in personal exchanges at seminars and clouds and their physical processes. The hurricane meetings, led to a visit to Imperial College in 1954. effort was also instrumental in providing the com- Here, Joanne, interacting with Scorer and Ludlum, munity with two NOAA P3s, which have been used developed the first finite-difference cumulus cloud for research on tropical cyclones and other weather model, based on laboratory experiments, observa- phenomena for 40 years. tions of glider pilots, and theory. The model, which After a brief interlude at the envisioned the cloud as a buoyant bubble entraining (1974–79), Joanne accepted an offer to lead the Severe

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