Thompson, Philip Duncan
Oral history interview with Philip Duncan Thompson, 1986 December 5.
In this interview, Philip Duncan Thompson describes his career in numerical meteorology. Topics include: attitudes in the early 1940s towards possibilities of predicting the weather numerically; Jules Charney; the Numerical Meteorology Project at the Institute for Advanced Study; John von Neumann; the meteorology research group at the Cambridge Air Force Research Center; the establishment of the Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit; the U.S. Air Force research center that he helped establish in Sweden; Thompson's work as associate director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Thompson (1922-1994) was a meteorologist and physicist. Internationally known theoretician in numerical weather prediction, atmospheric dynamics, and turbulence. Ph.D. in meterology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; chief Atmosphere Analysis Laboratory, Air Force Cambridge Research Labs., 1948-1951; head Development Division, Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit, 1954-1958; project leader, International Meteorological Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, 1958-1960; research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), 1960-1994; also first associate director of NCAR, director of the Laboratory of Atmospheric Science, and director of the Advanced Study program.
Thompson, Philip Duncan
Charney, Jule G.
Von Neumann, John, 1903-1957
Air Force Cambridge Research Center (U.S.)
Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, N.J.)
National Center for Atmospheric Research (U.S.)
Meteorology -- Research
Numerical weather forecasting
Interviews. aat
Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
Aspray, William, interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
University of Minnesota. Charles Babbage Institute. Center for the History of Computing. University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA