Early Career
On April 16, 1940, he was hired by the United States Weather Bureau. First assigned as a junior observer of meteorology at Brownsville, Texas, he was then temporarily assigned to Swan Island. After the Pearl Harbor attack, he was promoted to forecaster at the New Orleans office. As part of a United States Weather Bureau scholarship, he did graduate work at the University of Chicago in 1943 and 1944. After a stint as a hurricane forecaster in Miami under Grady Norton, he was assigned to help create the Army Air Force weather school in Panama. There he had his first flight into a tropical cyclone. After the war, he persuaded Air Force Hurricane Hunters to allow him to fly along on what he called 'piggy back missions', where he would take scientific observations using the primitive instruments.
Following VJ day and the dissolution of the weather school, Simpson returned to Miami. He was then assigned to Weather Bureau headquarters, working directly for Dr. Francis Reichelderfer. In 1949, Reichelderfer assigned Simpson to Hawaii to be in charge of consolidating the Weather Bureau's Pacific operations. There he founded a weather observation station on Mauna Loa, studied Kona lows, and flew a research mission into Typhoon Marge aboard a specifically equipped Air Force weather plane. He continually urged Weather Bureau management to fund modest levels of hurricane research, but budgets during the early 1950s didn't allow this. Then the devastating 1954 Atlantic hurricane season changed the minds of several New England congressmen, and a special appropriation was passed to improve the Weather Bureau's hurricane warning system. Reichelderfer appointed Bob Simpson to head up the National Hurricane Research Project (NHRP) in 1955.
Read more about this topic: Robert Simpson (meteorologist)
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