Joan Simpson
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook.

In 1983 The American Meteorological Society awarded Joan Simpson the prestigious Carl-Gustav Rossby research award, and elected her as the society's president. Her work in cumulus cloud research over the past 50 years has been an essential part of our understanding of the entire atmosphere.

It's somewhat ironic that that she received the award named for Mr. Rossby because of what Rossby himself told Joan Simpson in 1949 as she was becoming the first woman in history to earn a Ph. D. in meteorology. He said that cloud research would be an excellent problem for a little girl to work on because it's not very important and few people are interested in it.

Before you bestow Carl-Gustav Rossby with the politically incorrect award for dubious achievement, realize that he did become extremely supportive of Simpson's pioneering work and was most likely a victim of the accepted way of thinking in the middle part of the century. Rossby's name later became attached to a planet wide air circulation known as a Rossby wave. But Simpson was not concerned with her trailblazing status as a woman in meteorology. She was more concerned with being a trailblazer as a meteorologist, period. When the rest of the meteorological, academic world was looking at large scale weather systems she was saying, "wait a minute, these little cumulus clouds shouldn't be overlooked". Her work has given us a large part of what we now know about hurricanes and tornadoes, both of which are driven by Joan Simpsons favorite subject, cumulus clouds.

The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported in part by Subaru. Thanks today to executive engineer Sean Doucette.