| http://www.canadaeast.com/rss/article/1380791 The field of meteorology lost one of its true pioneers last year when American meteorologist Dr. Joanne Simpson passed away at the age of 86 in Washington, D.C. A world-renowned atmospheric scientist, Simpson won high praise for her discoveries about the nature of clouds and the formation of hurricanes. She was also the first woman to earn a PhD in meteorology. In a career that spanned six decades, Simpson spent a big part of it as the chief of the Severe Storms Branch of NASA's Laboratory for the Atmosphere. And she remained active with NASA right up until shortly before her death. At that time, she was leading efforts in cloud modelling and space-based meteorological experiments. The daughter of a Boston newspaperman, Simpson got her pilot's licence when she was only 16. She later said that flying among the clouds piqued her interest in the weather. She won a scholarship to the University of Chicago to study meteorology and taught weather forecasting to aviators during the Second World War. She then got her master's degree, but the meteorology department refused to give her a fellowship to go for her doctorate degree despite her high marks. "They told me it was totally inappropriate for a woman to be a meteorologist," she said in an interview in 1998 with USA Today. But fortunately, Simpson ignored that advice, persevered and got her doctorate degree in meteorology. But she often mentioned later that sexism held back her career. Over the years, her research involved riding in a surplus Navy PBY Catalina "flying boat," frequently into storms. But it paid off, as she developed some of the first mathematical models of clouds, using a slide rule for calculations because computers were not available. Simpson later pioneered computers to model weather. She really made her name known in the meteorology field in the 1950s when she and her former professor, Herbert Riehl, came up with an explanation of how the atmosphere shifted heat and moisture away from the tropics to higher latitudes. The explanation entailed the so-called "hot tower hypothesis" that helped her later shed light on the formation and movement of hurricanes. A "hot tower" is a tropical cumulonimbus cloud that penetrates the tropopause. These clouds are referred to as "hot" because they rise high in the air as a result of the large amount of latent heat released as water vapour condenses into liquid. Using the hot tower theory, Simpson showed how hurricanes derive energy from heat generated with cumulonimbus clouds that stretch to the stratosphere. During her career, Simpson did stints at some of the world's most prestigious facilities. Included were the University of Chicago, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Experimental Meteorological Laboratory and, of course, NASA. During her long tenure with NASA, Simpson undertook what she deemed to be her most ambitious project. And that was directing satellite measurement of rainfall across the tropics. Her discoveries from the project demonstrated how dust and smoke influence rainfall and how Atlantic hurricanes are created. Simpson, however, gave little stock to climate change theorists. Even when she was retired, she would re-emerge to take a few swipes at the global warming supporters. She frequently argued that their "dire predictions" were over-dependent on computer models. "We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system," Simpson wrote in a conference paper in 2008. "We only need to watch the weather forecasts." Simpson has authored and co-written more than 190 scientific articles. Dorothy Zukor, deputy director of Earth Sciences at Goddard's Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Md., noted that in addition to being "excited and enthusiastic" about her own research, Simpson was always helping students to become scientists. "She has left a true legacy - not only from her own work but for the future of the field,"said Zukor. |