Over a remarkable career spanning some 75 years, Robert Homer Simpson arguably contributed more than any other individual to observing, predicting, and warning of hurricanes. At the age of 100, he delivered the keynote address at a Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology conference. He died at his home in Washington, DC, on 19 December 2014 at 102.
Bob was born on 19 November 1912 in Corpus Christi, Texas. A near-death experience in the Corpus Christi hurricane of 1919 imprinted on his six-year-old mind the tragedy and devastation that hurricanes can bring. His contributions stem from both scientific writing and his lifelong commitment to high-quality hurricane observations. He recognized that progress in understanding and predicting hurricanes depended first and foremost on obtaining data, which was completely lacking when he first joined the US Weather Bureau, now the National Weather Service, in 1940. An outstanding organizer and leader, Bob repeatedly found ways to work within or around the sometimes overly bureaucratic system and accomplish what needed to be done.
Well before satellite observations became available, Bob was one of the first meteorologists to fly into hurricanes in military aircraft equipped with early weather radar. Even those early radar systems clearly showed the eye, the ring of rapidly rotating heavy rainfall surrounding the eye (now called the eyewall), and the ubiquitous spiral rainbands. His publication “Exploring the eye of Typhoon ‘Marge’ 1951” (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, volume 33, page 286, 1952) became a classic scientific reference. But Bob quickly recognized that the military reconnaissance flights of the 1940s and 1950s, while useful in the warning process, would not lead to fundamental scientific knowledge. He was convinced that a dedicated research effort and dedicated aircraft equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation were needed.
Bob’s opportunity came in 1954 when hurricanes Carol, Edna, and Hazel struck the US East Coast, with Hazel conveniently passing near Washington, DC, while Congress was in session. He leveraged those storms to create the National Hurricane Research Project (NHRP) the following year, and he became its first director. Dedicated hurricane research aircraft soon were built, equipped with up-to-date radars. Although Bob took a leave of absence to obtain his PhD in meteorology in 1962 at the University of Chicago under Herbert Riehl, who was widely recognized as the father of tropical meteorology, the NHRP rapidly became the world’s intellectual center of hurricane research, and it hosted many international visitors. Its collocation with the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida, ensured that the research was grounded in real-world problems to solve. The first numerical prediction models of hurricanes emerged from those seminal years, all a tribute to Bob’s vision.
Bob married the outstanding scientist Joanne Malkus in 1965, and they became a powerful and effective team. They conceived the innovative idea that seeding a hurricane with silver iodide could reduce its strength. Their initial idea of seeding the eyewall evolved to seeding supercooled cloud particles just outside the eyewall. That project, dubbed Stormfury, required substantial upgrades to aircraft instrumentation. Many years later the measurements obtained during the project led to the community consensus that a hurricane contains insufficient supercooled water for effective conversion to ice particles, in part because the unmodified storm generally has such ice already in abundance in the targeted locations. Although the hurricane modification hypothesis did not work out, the data and associated research from Stormfury facilities have provided major advances in our understanding and prediction of these dangerous storms.
Another innovation of Bob’s stems from his experience in 1968–73 as director of the National Hurricane Center, where he learned that public response to hurricane warnings was often not commensurate with the actual threat. Teaming up with engineer Herbert Saffir, they developed the five-category Saffir–Simpson intensity scale, now universally recognized as an effective means of portraying storm impact potential.
Bob’s achievements were wide-ranging. He helped establish the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, well known for its long record of atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements. He transformed the National Hurricane Center’s technical facilities and its operational procedures. He was the author of several books on the hurricane and its impact. He and Joanne taught at the University of Virginia, and they founded the consulting firm of Simpson Weather Associates. He and Joanne, who died in 2010, funded a fellowship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research to encourage outstanding young scientists to develop careers studying tropical cyclones. We have lost a pioneer and an icon who has had an immense impact in our field.
