*Please note: due to the time of this meeting, the Consortium will not host a table at its Philadelphia office. All members of the working group are invited to participate online.*
Jim Fleming: Into the Clouds: Joanne Simpson and the Tropical Atmosphere
This discussion will be based on the life and work of Joanne (Gerould) Simpson (1923-2010), examines the history of women in meteorology and the history of tropical meteorology in the context of Simpson's long and productive career as pioneer scientist, project leader, and mentor.
In 1943 women had no status in meteorology, tropical weather was largely aer incognita, and Joanne Gerould, a new graduate student at the University of Chicago, had just set her sights on understanding the behavior of clouds. Establishing her career in an era of overwhelming marginalization of women in science was no easy matter, and Joanne (who published under three married names and raised three children) had to fight every step of the way. Under the mentorship of Herbert Riehl, she received a Ph.D. from Chicago in 1949. Later, while working at Woods Hole, she collaborated with Riehl on their revolutionary and controversial "hot tower" hypothesis that cumulonimbus clouds were the driving force in the tropical atmosphere, providing energy to power the global circulation.
The mechanism of hot towers alludes to the incessant battle between buoyancy and entrainment in tropical convection, valorizing those clouds that successfully break through the trade wind inversion to soar to the top of the troposphere. The metaphor of hot towers points to the incessant battles Joanne waged between her sky-high aspirations and the dark psychological and institutional forces dragging her down. Yet she prevailed, attaining personal and professional accomplishments, especially in her years at NASA where she directed the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite program.
Jim Fleming is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College. He earned a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. His books include Meteorology in America (Johns Hopkins, 1990), Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford, 1998), The Callendar Effect (AMS Books, 2007), Fixing the Sky (Columbia, 2010), and Inventing Atmospheric Science (MIT, 2016). Awards include the Eduard Brückner Prize for interdisciplinary climate research and the Sally Hacker and Louis Battan book prizes. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Society, and series editor of Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology.