The Atmosphere - A Challenge

Richard S. Lindzen met Charney in 1961 at Harvard, where he was then a graduate student. Charney frequently met with students at Harvard at various seminars and social occasions. In the spring quarter of 1967 Lindzen and Charney were together at UCLA, where they discussed problems in tropical meteorology. Lindzen is currently Professor Emeritus of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Science. He works at the Cato Institute, a think tank where he focuses on the interaction between science and policymakers. Edward. N. Lorenz met Charney in 1952 in Cambridge, Massachusetts at a turbulence conference. Between sessions they managed to talk about some aspects of the barotropic vorticity equation, and these discussions established a pattern that was to persist over the years. Dr. Lorenz was a staff member of M.I.T.'s meteorology department from 1948 to 1955, when he becamean assistant professor. He was promoted to professor in 1962 and served as head of the department from 1977 to 1981. He became an emeritus professor in 1987. Dr. Edward N. Lorenz died on April 16th, 2008 at the age of 90. As a pioneer of the chaos theory, he was best known for the notion of the 'butterfly effect' and the Lorenz attractor. George W. Platzman met Charney in December 1946 or January 1947 at the University of Chicago, on returning to Chicago after a two-year absence, a few months before Charney departed for Oslo. In 1949-51 he was a part-time consultant to the Meteorology Group at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he participated with Charney and others in the ENIAC computations of 1950 and 1951. George W. Platzman, Professor Emeritus in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, died on August 2nd, 2008 at the age of 88. Since early in his career he helped formulate the first weather forecast by computer (on the ENIAC in 1950), he has contributed to the transformation of weather forecasting from qualitative guesswork to quantitative science. He will be remembered as a pioneer in the field of storm-surge forecasting and one of the founders of modern meteorology.