Joseph Smagorinsky - Education and Early Career

Education and Early Career

Joseph, aided by the G. I. Bill, went on to earn his BS (1947), MS (1948), and PhD (1953) at New York University. In the middle of his sophomore year at NYU, he entered the air force and joined an elite group of cadet recruits, chosen for their talents in mathematics and physics. Those talents led Smagorinsky to be selected for the air force meteorology program. He and other recruits were then sent to Brown University to study mathematics and physics for six months. He was then sent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to learn dynamical meteorology. His instructor was Ed Lorenz, who later pioneered the mathematical theory of deterministic chaos. During the war Smagorinsky flew in the nose of bombers as a weather observer, making weather forecasts based on visible factors such as the estimated size of waves, and the observed air temperature and wind velocity at the plane’s altitude.

Following the war, Smagorinsky concluded his studies. He originally aspired to be a naval architect, but was not admitted to the Webb Institute. He then turned to meteorology as a career and educational focus. As a doctoral student, while serving the remainder of his army commitment, he attended a lecture on weather forecasting conducted by Jule Charney, and asked a series of pointed questions during the question-and-answer session following the talk. Charney, a prominent atmospheric scientist, invited Smagorinsky to the Princeton, NJ Institute for Advanced Study to examine the possible predictability of large-scale motions in the middle troposphere (the lower part of the atmosphere) using the new electronic computer being designed by John von Neumann. In April 1950, Smagorinsky participated in a major milestone of modern meteorology; together with Ragnar Fjortoft, John Freeman and George Platzman, he worked with Charney to solve Charney’s simplest equations on the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). Von Neumann’s new Princeton computer had been delayed so arrangements were made with the Army to use its computer at Aberdeen, Maryland. The results were realistic enough to demonstrate that weather prediction by numerical process was a promising prospect. After the ENIAC work, Smagorinsky moved to the Institute for Advanced Study to work with Charney and von Neumann on the development of a radical new approach to weather forecasting that employed the new technology of the computer.

Before the advent of computers in the late 1940s, weather forecasting was very crude. George Platzman of the University of Chicago felt that “academic meteorology in this country is still suffering from the trade-school blues.” The American Meteorological Society and its leaders, most of whom taught in universities, still aspired to turn meteorology into a professional discipline given the same respect accorded engineering and the physical sciences. An exceptional mathematician, von Neumann was among the first to see the potential afforded by computers for much faster processing of data and thus more responsive weather forecasting. He was not satisfied with mathematics as an abstract practice. Weather forecasting provided him with a very concrete application of mathematical principles that could exploit the new computer technology. At the Institute for Advanced Study, he used his mathematical knowledge and Smagorinsky worked with Charney to develop a new approach called numerical weather prediction. This approach relied on data collected from weather balloons. The data were then fed into computers and subjected to the laws of physics, enabling forecasts of how turbulence, water, heat, and other factors interacted to produce weather patterns. (Smagorinsky endeared himself to his children by visiting their elementary school classrooms to demonstrate how weather balloons worked.)

In his doctoral dissertation, conducted at NYU under the direction of Bernhard Haurwitz, Smagorinsky developed a new theory for how heat sources and sinks in midlatitudes, created by the thermal contrast between land and oceans, disturbed the path of the jet stream. This theory provided one of the first applications of Jule Charney's remarkable simplification of the equations of motion for the atmosphere, now known as quasi-gesotrophic theory. This work benefited greatly from interactions with Charney at the Institute for Advanced Study. This theory has been elaborated over the years to provide numerous insights into the maintenance of the climate in midlatitudes and the interaction between the tropics and midlatitudes.