Availability of source material
"SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN, Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age"
Copyright:Copernicus/Springer Verlag (New York)
These pages are not available for adverts on this site.
Book description.
color to the early story of meteorology satellites. True to his experimenter's approach to life, he was at the time trying a novel therapy following three heart operations. He had the same degree of curiosity about the experiment he was participating in as he had in his meteorological work.
Others interviewed for this section include
Dave Johnson, Robert White, Joseph Smagorinsky, Pierre Morel, P. Krishna Rao, Bob Sheets, Leo Skille, Bob Sutton, and Bob Ohckers.
When I interviewed P. Krishna Rao and Bob Sheets, I was considering writing a book that brought the story of meteorology satellites right up to date. In the end, that wasn't possible but these interviews helped give me a sense of the evolution of the technology, and what I learned from them is, I hope, implicitly present in this section.
Chapter twelve: A Time of Turbulence
The promise of satellites for weather prediction was intuitively obvious to a few engineers and scientists in the 1950s (page 130). See RAND publications itemized under chapter thirteen.
Harry Wexler's extensive work in promoting Verner Suomi's experiments to the IGY and in the early days of satellite meteorology (page 131) is obvious from the minutes of the IGY's TPESP, from Wexler's letters to Verner Suomi, from his role as a consultant for Suomi's and Parent's radiation balance experiment (shown by TPESP minutes), and from minutes of the National Research Council's Committee on Meteorological Aspects of Satellites in the immediate post-Sputnik days. Wexler died at the age of 50 in 1962.
Sig Fritz's role in the early days (page 131), including his assignment of a broom cupboard for an office, is expounded on in Margaret Courain's Ph.D. thesis, 'Technology Reconciliation in the Remote Sensing Era of US Civilan Weather Forecasting, Rutgers University' (1991).
Dave Johnson's participation in both the civilian and defense weather satellite programs is well known among satellite meteorologists (page
257
|