Pioneers in Science and Technology Series: Robert White

              

PIONEERS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES

ORAL HISTORY OF DR. ROBERT M. WHITE
Interviewed by Clarence Larson 
Filmed by Jane Larson
January 23, 1984
 
DR. WHITE: Well, I’m a Bostonian, and I guess my early life was centered around activities up in New England. I went to high school at what is the oldest public high school in the United States, the Boston Public Latin School.
MR. LARSON: The Boston Public Latin School has many distinguished alumni. I’ve heard of them from time to time.
DR. WHITE: It was founded in 1635, one year before Harvard College. The Boston Public Latin School was what you would call today a magnet school. It was a school designed to attract bright young people from all over the city as contrasted with the rest of the high schools in the city which were essentially local or regional high schools serving various parts of the city. So the Boston Public Latin School had a varied kind curriculum designed for youngsters to go to college. It was a pretty rough school and the courses there focused on languages, science, history, and all the kinds one might wish to take to get into a college. Many of the Boston Public Latin School graduates went on to Harvard, and that’s what I did. I took my undergraduate work at Harvard University. I started out there as a geologist. I was very much interested, at that time, in the problems of the earth, the atmosphere, the oceans and geology seemed to be a good science to become involved in. I was very excited about the courses I took in geology. Of course the necessary mathematics and chemistry that one would have to take to become a geologist. My class was the class of 1942 however, that’s the famous class that never graduated because of World War II. In the second half of my sophomore year, it was clear that many of us were not going to finish our courses at Harvard and by December of 1942, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor all the members of my class were preparing to go into the service. At that time the Armed Services were looking for people with scientific backgrounds. They especially were looking for people with backgrounds in mathematics and physics. I had as part of my work in geology, had been very much interested in the atmosphere and how the atmosphere did change the surface of the earth and I became associated with the then famous professor at Harvard, Charles Franklin Brooks, the man who founded the American Meteorological Society and one of the greatest authorities on cloud systems. Charlie Brooks was also in addition to being professor at Harvard, he was director of the then Blue Hill Observatory. The Blue Hill Observatory was very famous in meteorology and probably as the longest climatological record of any observatory in the United States. I was looking for some job in my freshman year of Harvard and Charlie Brooks was kind enough to offer me a job as an observer at Blue Hill Observatory and that was my first exposure to the atmosphere as a professional in a sense. I was a weather observer and had to take the observations each day and learned about weather instrumentation up on top of Blue Hill. So when World War II broke out when they were looking for youngsters, students with mathematics and physics background, I was especially attracted to one announcement which they were looking for weather officers. Having some interest in weather and some exposure to it and wanting to go into the service, as most of us did in those days, at college I applied to become what was then an Aviation Cadet in what was then the Army Air Corps. I was selected to be an Aviation Cadet and found myself among a lot of other youngsters at the reception depot in Boston. I had kissed my mother and the rest of my family goodbye telling them I was off to the war, only to find when I got to the reception depot on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts, that I had been assigned to MIT which was just down the river from Harvard University. (Laughter) I called my mother at that time and said that well, I’m finally in the Army. She said where are you? I said I’m at MIT. She said what do you mean ‘at MIT’? I thought they were going to send you away. I said no, I’m just down the river from Harvard University.
MR. LARSON: That’s an amazing story there. (Laughter) Of course right there at that particular time, the radar project was going at its maximum, you might say.
DR. WHITE: That’s right. The radiation laboratories at MIT were in full swing at that time. 
MR. LARSON: By that time had, I suppose the military had realized that perhaps meteorology was going to play a much greater role than it ever had in any war.
DR. WHITE: Well as you recall, President Roosevelt at that time was going on the air calling for production of 50,000 aircrafts in the space of a year and everybody thought he was out of his mind, but if we were going to have 50,000 aircrafts in the Air Corps and in the Navy, you were obviously going to have to have weather forecasters who could forecast the weather. Remember these are piston aircrafts. They were very, very weather sensitive. They had ceilings to the order of 10,000, 15,000 feet. Some of the later aircrafts at the end of the war, got up to be higher, but they were very, very weather sensitive and of course it wasn’t just an importance to the Air Corps, it was important to the Army, it was important to the Navy. It was the single largest determinant as to when you would undertake a military operation, when the enemy might undertake a military operation. It determined how you might undertake such an operation, whether it was an amphibious landing, or an air raid, and so on. The weather was essential to the entire war effort. They trained, I don’t know how many thousands of weather officers, during World War II. I was one of them and after my training at MIT I went into the field as a weather officer and found myself out in the Far East forecasting for the Far Eastern Air Forces. I was at that time making forecasts for flights from the Philippines, from Okinawa and when the war ended, I found myself in Korea at that time, with the initial occupying troops and was, led the first contingent of American forces to occupy what was then Gimpo Airfield, the major airfield outside of Seoul, Korea, so that we could receive US aircrafts and supplies and troops. That was my wartime experience. It was a very interesting one. I got to appreciate much about meteorology and felt it might make an interesting career when I got home. Of course as I indicated, we never did graduate from Harvard formally in a graduation ceremony, the class of 1944, but while at MIT the courses I had taken there, and I took some additional courses while in uniform in the Geology Department of MIT in combination, they enabled me to get a bachelor’s degree at Harvard. I returned from the service around 1946 and had to decide what it was I wanted to do. I wasn’t terribly keen about going back to school at that time. I wanted to try something else, and I actually went into the business of writing. I became a reporter for a newspaper and later went to work for an advertising agency as a copy chief, but my interests in science soon won out and I reapplied to go back to MIT for my graduate degree, was accepted and in 1949, got my master’s degree at MIT and in 1950, got my doctor’s degree. 
MR. LARSON: What was your official field for your master’s and doctorate? Was it meteorology or geology?
DR. WHITE: It was in meteorology. I had as a result of the war had become very interested in the atmosphere and I felt that I could make a better contribution, I would enjoy being in the field of meteorology much more than the field of geology. I don’t know whether that was a wise decision, but it was a decision none the less and the field of meteorology was an interesting one. I became very much interested in the problems of what we call the general circulation of the atmosphere. As you know, the circulation of the atmosphere is largely determined by the fact that the equatorial regions of the world are heated and the polar regions of the world are cooled and the temperature difference between the equator and the pole of course bring about the global circulations that we observe. The question of how this global circulation changed, what caused it to change, it was a fundamental question governing all of our understanding of atmospheric processes and especially governed our ability to make forecasts in the weather. When I graduated in 1950, my doctor’s work had been in understanding the energy balance of the general circulation of the atmosphere and I left MIT and took a post with what was then the Geophysics Research Director of the Air Force Cambridge Research Center. That institution still exists up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was run by the Air Force, a series of research laboratories and for a young scientist, fresh out of the university with a doctor’s degree, and in an environment at that time in which the Department of Defense having had its experiences in World War II with the importance of science and technology to the military effort with the DOD at that time being so vitally interested in continued support of science and technology in the university community, I found myself in a position where I had a great amount of money to spend and in a position to stimulate and support a variety of research activities throughout the university community. It was a very timely point to be in such a position. Timely because it was just at that time that we were beginning to understand that it might be possible to make weather forecasts by numerical methods, that is make weather forecasts on the basis of the physical laws which govern the motions in the atmosphere and with the advent at that time of the very early digital computers, vacuum tube devices, it became possible to conceive at that time of actually numerically calculating of what the weather would be. 
MR. LARSON: What year was that again? Around…
DR. WHITE: This was in the very early ‘50’s, ’51, ’52. When the Illiac was developed by the Signal Corp and John von Neumann was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, along with his colleagues who later did so much to contribute to the advancement of meteorology. Jule Charney, who was a professor at MIT, and Norman Phillips and Joseph Smagorinsky, a group had assembled around John von Neumann who believed that it would now be possible to use computers to base weather forecasting on numerical methods by integrating the physical laws governing atmospheric motion. Indeed the first numerical forecast of the weather was made by von Neumann’s group, largely under the leadership at that time, of Jule Charney and these others I had mentioned on the Illiac machine. This was a breakthrough in weather forecasting of an enormous importance. Up until that moment, all weather forecasts I think had been sort of an art that I don’t mean to imply that there weren’t physical principals governing the practice of weather forecasting, there were, many of them. But they were all assembled in the mind of a human being who had to put all of his physical understanding together, the atmosphere being such a very, very complex system, it was really beyond the ability of any human being to be able to take into account all the physical factors that one would want to take into account and forecast the weather. The idea that one would someday numerically calculate the weather on the basis of physical law goes back over a half a century, goes back to the days of the Norwegian meteorologist, Vilhelm Bjerknes who at the turn of the century, around 1904 predicted that one day weather forecasting would be done in this way but of course the means were never available. It would be impossible to make the numerical calculations required. However, in 1922, a rather well known British scientist by the name of Richardson, did actually attempt to make numerical forecasts of the weather by hand. He actually tried to solve and step ahead these non-linear numerical equations by hand and of course he was unsuccessful in doing so, but he demonstrated that it could be possible if one did have the kinds of digital devices which later became available starting with the Illiac. 
MR. LARSON: Yes, of course with the, as digital machines came along, almost every year, you had additional computing power available to you, so that you could do these things. They were just unavailable in the ’20’s.
DR. WHITE: That’s right. When you look at the computing power we have today, compared to the computing power that was available in 1950, the first glimmerings of digital computers, it is [inaudible] magnitudes larger in capability. Of course the kinds of equations that we can solve numerically are much more complex and the qualities of the weather forecast have improved remarkably. Anyway, at that time, the early ’50’s, we were just at the beginning of the modern period of weather forecasting, we were just at the beginning of that period, which art was being transformed into science. I was in a position, not only to participate in that kind of work, which I did, but also to stimulate and support the many scientists in various universities with the funds that were then available through the Department of Defense and stimulating the research into numerical weather predictions and in particular into problems of long range weather prediction. Long range weather prediction had become a field in which I had become very much interested in. it’s a much more complicated task than forecasting the weather over 24 or 48 hour periods, but one which never the less has a great economic and social value, and one which was directly connected of course with the general understanding of the circulation of the atmosphere that I became very much interested and did a lot of my own work looking at various long range forecasting methods. Sorry to say that there were no breakthroughs in long range weather forecasting and even today, long range weather forecasts when you get out beyond several weeks become problematic at best. 
MR. LARSON: Yes, although I think I’ve heard you say before, with satellites you’ve got another new tool, to add to the computers. 
DR. WHITE: We have to take this step-by-step because the satellites came along just about a decade or so after numerical weather prediction. The central point to be able to calculate the course of the future weather numerically was that one could begin to not only to make weather forecasts on a day to day basis, but one could begin to simulate the processes of the global atmospheric circulation on computers. This I became deeply involved in and this is the kind of work that has led us to the fundamental understanding of the consequences of man’s interference with atmospheric processes. But that is an item for later in this story. My work at the Cambridge Research Center was in the nature of a stimulated role in supporting scientists and universities to get on with this task, and to get on with this task, they did. Well, I guess most scientists would feel that if there was one revolution in their life time, their great science, well that might be enough. I was very fortunate to be involved in two. As I indicated to you, in 1957, with the launching of the weather satellites, I’m sorry with the launching of the Soviet, Sputnik, not a weather satellite, it became clear that we would suddenly not only have, through the digital computer, the means of computing the weather, we would finally have available to us a observational platform circling the earth once every 90 minutes or so which could finally give us the global observations which we needed to put numerical weather prediction and weather prediction generally on  a sound scientific basis. Let me explain what the problem was. If you look at the observations around the earth in the early ‘50’s, what you would have found is that there are quite a few upper air observations, that is observations taken by radiosondes, these are instruments carried aloft by balloons which would measure the pressure, temperature,  and moisture. We would have maybe 90 of these covering the entire United States. The Soviet Union at that time had many more than we did and most of the countries in the world with any development at all, took these upper air observations, but if you plotted these on a map of the globe, what you would find is that only about 20 percent of the globe was covered by these upper air observations. The rest of the globe had no weather observations except for surface observations over the land and an occasional ship observation over the ocean. But most of the atmosphere was effectively unobserved. And it was quite clear from our understanding of numerical weather prediction that unless you were able to obtain observations for the entire globe, you were never going to solve, solve, I mean bring about a significant improvements in weather forecasting. The satellite changed all that. The satellite was a platform which could cover any part of the globe, the oceans, the land inhabited, uninhabited. And it could view from an orbital altitude the clouds, that was the easiest thing to see with a camera of one kind or another, but it soon became possible with satellites, not only to observe the clouds, but to observe those kinds of things that were essential for numerical weather prediction. What you really needed to do was describe in quantitative terms the mass and motion fields of the atmosphere and however interesting the cloud fields were they would not give you a quantitative measure of the temperature, or the density or the pressure or the moisture, which is what you really needed to solve the equations.
MR. LARSON: What year was the first weather satellite that gave you data, when was that first launched?
DR. WHITE: The first experimental weather satellites, the Tiros series of weather satellites were launched starting in 1959, 1960, somewhere around that.
MR. LARSON: So very early.
DR. WHITE: Very early. It was recognized rather early on when the first idea of an earth orbiting satellite was first proposed that if you get up to that altitude, and you had a camera onboard, you were going to see lots. What many scientists tried to do was imagine what they might see from satellite altitude and construct charts when you see this from satellite altitude. Harry Wexler who was then the chief scientist for the Weather Bureau at the time did a lot of this preliminary work. It was clear that if we could get up there, we could see things that we had never seen before. That’s actually what happened. That’s getting a little bit ahead of the story, but because I should go back and trace my own.
MR. LARSON: Yes. 
DR. WHITE: My own path through these sorts of radical developments. I left the, what was then the Air Force Cambridge Research Center around 1959 to go to Hartford, Connecticut. I was very much interested in at that time trying my hand in the industrial sector and the Travelers Insurance Company in Hartford, Connecticut, at that time was very much concerned with problems of extended insurance coverage. That is, the risks involved in wind damage or damage due to tidal waves, various kinds of damage that were attributed to the weather and they had decided that they were going to be very active in the field of weather. They had attracted a friend of mine, a professor, Tom Malone from MIT to come down and establish a weather research center there at the Travelers Insurance Company. He encouraged me to come down, which is what I did. It was shortly after that that we took the step of forming what probably was the first company in the private sector deeply concerned with environmental concerns very broadly. We formed what was then known as the Travelers Research Center. It was a non-profit corporation whose goal was to examine the full range of environmental problems, not just problems of the weather, but water resources problems, pollution problems, and other kinds of problems as the concern in the country and the industry about environmental conditions became more insistent. The Travels Research Center which I had the privilege of being president, was, as I said, one of the first corporations in the private sector to try to do research in this very, very broad field. As I indicated to you earlier, I’d always been very much interested in the earth and its problems, the solid earth, the atmosphere and its oceans. This was an opportunity to try and do something in the private sector. Well it was a rather successful little company. We did a lot of things that were premature in that the ideas that we had seemed to be a little bit a head of their time that have since seen the light of day. For example one of the tasks we took on for the then Federal Aviation Administration, was designing a completely automatic weather observing and forecasting system. Now this you have to remember was around 1960. The idea which has since been brought into the implementation was a sound idea, but the technology just wasn’t there. We didn’t have the microchips and the electronics and the instrumentation which could have brought that into being. The instrumentation that we had was awkward, the problems of storing data were awkward, the problems of communication were difficult, but we worked on that concept for two or three years and it was obvious that, hey, there wasn’t going to be enough money to put anything like that in and it was quite obvious that the technology really wasn’t up to the job. 
MR. LARSON: Did you attempt to do some of that instrumentation with say vacuum tubes, where you need say a thousand vacuum tubes to take the place of a single small chip?
DR. WHITE: That’s right. 
MR. LARSON: It just would make it impossible for you to…
DR. WHITE: It was a good idea; it just was a head of its time. We also did some of the early work looking at air pollution problems at the Travelers Research Center and began to get into some of the river basin problems, small river basins in Connecticut at that time. I was at that time, 1963, asked if I would not come to Washington as the Chief of the Weather Bureau. The person who contacted me on this was a very interesting scientist and engineer who was [John] Herbert Hollomon who had come down from the General Electric Company to become the first assistant secretary for science and technology at the Department of Commerce. The Department of Commerce had never had an assistant secretary for science and technology and this was a new thing for the department to do at that time. He asked me if I would come down to take the place of the Chief of the Weather Bureau, F.W. [Francis Wilton] Reichelderfer, familiarly known as Reich, who had been in that post for 25 years, had come into that post during the Depression and had done a magnificent job in leading the Weather Bureau. Of course it was exciting to me to think that I might go to Washington and take over this very important governmental organization and in a field which had become my life’s work. Of course there was no hesitation at all on my part of accepting and my wife and I came to Washington at that time.  I was an appointee of President Kennedy at that time. It turned out that I came down and took my post in October and of course he was assassinated just about a month and a half later. So I really never got to know President Kennedy although I am proud to have been one of his appointees. As Chief of the Weather Bureau, I suddenly found myself in a position to influence the course of events in which I had never imagined possible for a single individual, as a scientist. I was suddenly in a position to decide what it is our country would do with regards to the weather satellites, numerical weather prediction, automated weather observing systems, what we would do in our relations with other nations in exchange of weather data. I found myself in a position where I could decide what kind of research was going to be supported, what kind of laboratories we would have. It was a marvelous, marvelous opportunity and I have to say very, very heavy. Enjoyed every minute of it. I had therefore come to Washington in 1963 at an absolutely magnificent time for anybody to come…
MR. LARSON: These were really the golden years for not only meteorology, but space science and atomic energy.
DR. WHITE: Absolutely.
MR. LARSON: That was a very active period, so it must have been a very stimulating atmosphere.
DR. WHITE: It was very stimulating, yeah. The people you worked with were just wonderful. Anyway, I found myself in a position where I had to make the key decisions with regards to for example, the introduction of the first operational weather satellite system, which was introduced about 1965. I found myself in a position of having to decide where and how we would set up our numerical weather prediction center for daily weather predictions and how we would work with other countries in designing international observing systems, which the satellites now permitted. I became in my capacity as Chief of the Weather Bureau, the U.S. representative to the World Meteorological Organization. The World Meteorological Organization is a U.N. agency devoted to the weather and of course you understand that weather is the international science par excellence. The weather knows no boundaries. It travels over everybody’s country and in order to predict the weather in one country you need weather observations from another country and even though you don’t speak the same language, you have to be able to interpret weather data from the Soviet Union, or Japan, or Africa. So over the years the international weather community worked out codes so that an observation taken in Uganda could be understood by a weather person in Cambodia, or you name it.
MR. LARSON: So in other words, a fairly early standardization enabled people to work together. This is not true in all fields.
DR. WHITE: The opportunity presented itself at that time to somebody who came from the United States with the satellite capability that we obviously had and moving into the international arena was just fantastic. We took forward into the international arena at that time a proposal supported first by President Kennedy and later by President Johnson and subsequent presidents, a proposal that all nations of the world undertake to collaborate in establishing a world weather watch and a global weather research program. The nations of the world thought that this was really a good idea; everybody could see a benefit from it. We needed the cooperation of all the nations in order to gather all the observations that we needed and through our efforts, the world community, the World Meteorological Organization did organize to undertake what I think probably in retrospect is one of the truly outstanding instances of international collaboration in science. The World Weather Watch and the Global Atmospheric Program together brought into being what is now the global system of geosynchronous satellites. These are the satellites whose orbits are high enough so that they affix with respect to positions on the earth, launched by the European countries, Japan, by ourselves, by the Soviet Union. Geosynchronous satellites that now give us a network of observation global in scope which has revolutionized our understanding of global weather conditions. It has enabled us to deploy systems of unattended ocean buoys so that the ocean areas could be covered with weather observations. It enabled us to bring to bear the full international capabilities in this field on a common problem. It was a very gratifying undertaking, this World Weather Watch and the Global Atmospheric Weather Program. 
MR. LARSON: Did that eventually lead them, as I remembered, out of this grew the, was it the International Geophysical Year had a good deal of international cooperation? Of course I guess that was perhaps broader than weather and meteorology, or…
DR. WHITE: In that geophysical year of course was 1957, the International Geophysical Year was the time of the launching of the Russian Sputnik, and in fact what the Soviets did was to beat the United States with the launching of a satellite.
MR. LARSON: Yes. 
DR. WHITE: We had proposed launching a satellite in connection with the International Geophysical Year and we were proposing to launch a little, tiny satellite, but the Soviets beat us to it. That was what the big shock was to this country.
MR. LARSON: I was under the impression that the International Geophysical Year was later in the ‘60’s. Sorry.
DR. WHITE: No, the International Geophysical Year took place in ’57, ’58, and was a different kind of program. It was not a tightly coordinated program in the sense that the Global Atmospheric Program was a very tightly coordinated program. It was a program in which each country did its own thing and afterwards of course you assemble the observations of each country and try to see whether you had something that was greater than the sum of the parts. 
MR. LARSON: In you international efforts…
DR. WHITE: The Global Atmospheric Research Program was quite different. Let me give you an example. We conducted a number of field experiments. A good one was the field experiment known as the Atlantic Tropic Experiment in which we attempted to observe a piece of the ocean in tropical regions just to the west of Dakar, in Africa, and we used Dakar as a base for operations we had some 30 vessels from some 15 different countries all having to have a single command in taking of observations, the timing of observations of all kinds. We had a fleet of aircrafts. There was Russian aircrafts, U.S. aircrafts, English aircraft, French aircraft, but all these aircraft were operating in a coordinated fashion under a single management. So it was quite a different kind of program than the International Geophysical Year. This is a very tightly knit, coordinated program in which each country put its assets and resources necessary to do these experiments under a single management set up were operated by the World Meteorological Organization.
MR. LARSON: And out of that comes some great concrete accomplishments.
DR. WHITE: The purpose, as I’ve indicated this, it was quickly, it was early on recognized as soon as you had computers to do the numerical weather forecast that with computers alone you weren’t going to make it. You weren’t going to make it unless you had both the computers to do the calculations, and you had to have the observations in order to do the calculations on. Now the computers gave us the computing capability, and the satellites gave us the observational capability. Now the two together have truly revolutionized weather forecasting. Before we had these devices, forecasts out beyond a day or two were just poor, the level of accuracy was not very much better than chance. With this program whose goal was to provide the observations and extend the time range of the forecast, weather forecasts today have reasonable accuracy on a day to day basis up to five days and we are now making forecasts on an average basis out to the order of ten days with some measure of skill. That’s a really substantial advance in forecasting the weather. We not only do this for our country, but it’s done for the whole world. In other words, the weather forecasting capability has been generated as a result of the computer and the satellite and of course the basic scientific understanding of weather processes has been truly remarkable. So you have the transformations from art to science, and then extended time range to forecast out a considerable distance of time, a major, major achievement, so that these things have had an enormous impact on our everyday life. The planning of all kinds of operations, whether it is agricultural, or transportation, air transportation, or what you do every day is now significantly affected by the availability of these new technologies and the improved understanding. It is not impossible to have happen what happened in 1938. In 1938, a hurricane, I don’t know where you were in 1938, but in 1938, a hurricane came up the east coast of the United States and caused enormous devastation. It wasn’t even recognized or known until it really hit land and devastated New England. That could happen today.
MR. LARSON: Providence, Rhode Island, I think was practically deluged.
DR. WHITE: Today we can observe those hurricanes in their early formation stage way out over the Atlantic Ocean, we can track them from, literally from minute to minute with geosynchronous satellites. We can understand their intensity. Now we don’t forecast hurricanes perfectly. There is still a great deal to learn about hurricanes, but there is no way a hurricane can approach any coast of the United States, or the islands surrounding the United States without being detected and tracked in some forecast.
MR. LARSON: That’s why the loss of life is much less than it used to be.
DR. WHITE: Loss of life has gone way down in connection with hurricanes. It is truly remarkable what has happened. The same thing along the west coast of the United States. Without observations over the oceans, the Pacific Ocean, the forecasts of the United States use to be very, very difficult, especially more northwards of the west coast, where the weather is really quite variable. But now with satellites, if you look at your daily television set, or get your forecast for the west coast of the United States, they are remarkably good. We can track these storms as they come in off the oceans, we know where they are. We know what their intensity is. If you add to this what it is we are now doing with weather radar, which gives you a more close in picture and is able to portray for you the precipitating elements of the storms, if you take your radar information combined with your satellite information and your high speed computers we are now in a position where we can move forward in not only looking at these larger scale features of the atmosphere, but even for observing and predicting the very small scale features of the atmosphere which up until now have escaped our ability to make good predictions, but that’s another story talking about the smaller scale stuff and that’s really on the frontier of modern meteorology. There is a new program called the Strom Program that is now being proposed, which would have in terms of the small scale weather phenomena, the hazardous weather phenomena, the wind shears, the tornados, the thunderstorms that cause so much destruction, that program is designed to do for that kind of weather phenomena what the Global Atmospheric Research Program and the World Weather Watch did for the larger scale weather phenomena. But that’s a story about technology and its changes and how those latest changes in technology are again revolutionizing our ability to forecast other kinds of weather phenomena. But I would like to go back, to my own involvement in these things because so many things go on simultaneously that if you tried to track a story element of an element of some feature through time, you miss all the other things that are going on at the same time. I don’t know how to communicate the simultaneousness of things in a taping such as this, but one has to understand the simultaneousness of what’s going on, in order to really understand how science is progressing, and what it’s impacts on society are. Today, we’ve only talked about forecasting the weather. But there are all sorts of other things that were going on in the atmosphere, which were a vital concern. We became concerned about the environmental impact, what human beings were doing, what society was doing to the atmosphere. We were becoming concerned about contamination of the water supplies; we were becoming concerned about what was happening to pollutions in the oceans. All of these things are related because really what you’re talking about, what you’re talking about man’s, humanity’s effect on the environment is what we call the biogeochemical cycles. We’re really talking about the circulation to the atmosphere of elements, chemicals, whether it’s sulfur, or nitrogen, or carbon and over eons of time of course the environmental system, that is the oceans, the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the solid earth have adjusted to the normal changes that take place. So the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has been constant, and the cycle by which sulfur is introduced naturally is circulated through atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere, the solid earth is well known. Our environmental system has adjusted to these. Now humanity disrupts the environment is by disrupting these biogeochemical cycles. They have been called by Gilbert White the life support systems of the globe. That is the biogeochemical circulation of these elements and humanity gradually has learned how to disrupt these biogeochemical circulations. That is we burn fossil fuels, you add sulfur dioxide to the atmosphere. You burn fossil fuels in automobiles and you add nitrogen to the atmosphere. If you fly supersonic transports in the stratosphere, you get oxides and nitrogen. If you use spray cans, you suddenly find yourself with fluoride carbons in the atmosphere. In any case, humanity by what it’s doing is the process of disrupting natural circulations of these elements. Well, what this really means is that the environment is a unity. You cannot deal with the atmosphere by itself. You cannot deal with the oceans by itself, or the biosphere, or the solid earth, it’s all part of a single global environmental system. Early on, I had become very much interested in the global environment as a system. The interactions between the oceans and the atmosphere, the atmosphere and the biosphere, and as Chief of the Weather Bureau, we had at the Department of Commerce at that time, the Coast Guard of Geodetic Survey which was essentially an ocean agency. We had in the National Bureau of Standards at that time what was called the Central Radio Propagation Laboratories, a group of scientists interested in the upper atmosphere. We thought about this and it turned out that in the Department of Commerce, in the middle ‘60’s, it became possible to put together elements of various organizations which would finally give the United States government a single organization which could look at the environment as a whole. Working with Herb Hollomon and others in the Federal Government, we made a proposal to President Johnson at the time, that it was a remarkable opportunity for putting together the first governmental institution that could look at the environment as a whole. Well as you know, I had interests in that at the Travelers Research Center in Hartford, Connecticut, and here was an opportunity to do something similar in the Federal Government. And President Johnson agreed that this was a good thing to do and Congress agreed that it was a pretty sound thing to do and so what immerged out of this was this environmental organization in the Federal Government. By environment, I mean this. It has the word “environment” in its title, and secondly it dealt with all parts of the environment. It didn’t deal with all environmental problems, for example it did not have responsibility to water pollution problems, or air pollution problems, those are in different parts of the Federal Government, but it was an organization which had responsibilities which cut across, atmospheric problems, oceanic problems, upper atmospheric problems, and suddenly we had then in the Federal Government the nucleus of an organization that could consider certain classes of environmental problems as at home.
MR. LARSON: That was on a more or less a macro scale than a micro scale of concerns. 
DR. WHITE: We became fascinated with this idea, and it the end of President Johnson’s term, the Congress had become very much interested in the whole area of the oceans and where the nation was going in the oceans and what it might do. There was appointed to the presidential commission by President Johnson, the president’s Commission on Marine Sciences and Engineering Resources. Its purpose was to look at what our country was doing in the oceans and what it ought to do. That commission came out with a view; again we really ought to look at the environment in its totality. It was impossible to look at the oceans by itself without looking to the atmosphere. The oceans are driven by the atmosphere much of what happens in the atmosphere is determined by the ocean. And that there were many different kinds of resources that we out to be worried about like the coastal sound, fisheries resources, all of which were affected by these environmental conditions and perhaps they ought to be looked at together.  This commission came out with a recommendation at the end of the Johnson administration to establish an independent agency called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report came out at the end of the Johnson administration and was delivered as a final report to President Nixon at the time. President Nixon was a very interesting person in many ways. One would not think of President Nixon as the president to really institutionalize the environmental movement in the United States government, but he did. It was President Nixon who, under whose administration the Environmental Protection Administration was brought into being, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was brought into being, the Council on Environmental Quality was brought into being. The institutionalization of the environmental movement was brought into being in Nixon’s administration. Many people don’t think of him as an environmental, an individual interested in environmental problems. 
MR. LARSON: That’s a very interesting point, but as I think back all these things did come in there. 
DR. WHITE: Of course you have to understand that President Nixon came in at the high tide of the environmental movement, but this is getting ahead of my story. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration came into being, President Nixon asked me to be the first administrator and I was. So that was the third president that I worked for. It was an interesting task to bring all the, nine different units from the United States government that came together in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But it gave me at that time a new insight into environmental management problems. I had gradually become more and more exposed from becoming merely interested in the science of weather to suddenly interested in the applications of weather to suddenly interested in, Oh my goodness, how do you go about managing this environment? What are the issues? How do you balance economic development and environmental quality? What do you do about these kinds of problems? It was brought home to me as I took this post of administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and I have to say I found some of these among the most challenging problems that I’ve ever dealt with. Fisheries problems seem like a back order among the problems we have to contend with in our country today, but fisheries illustrate a very, very important point as to what could happen to an environmental resource, a resource of some kind if it’s not managed wisely. As you know, the fisheries resources off the coast of the United States were being destroyed systematically by vast fleets of fishing vessels from the Soviet Union, Germany, and other European countries that literally fished out some of the commercially most valuable species along the east coast of the United States. Well, I got into as a result of this the problems of how do you regulate common resources? After all, that’s what the environment is. It’s a common resource. It’s a resource that belongs to no one, and it belongs to all of us. It’s a resource in which we all have a stake in protecting.
MR. LARSON: Yes, and it’s an international problem.
DR. WHITE: It is an international problem. And so I became deeply involved through this post in environmental questions of all kinds. In fact, I became the United States Whaling Commissioner to the International Whaling Commission. It was a very exciting time because before I became the Whaling Commissioner the way in which whales were managed on a worldwide basis was through what was called a blue whale unit. All whales were considered the same and they were all equated to the blue whale only in size. So coders were given to so many nations to catch so many blue whale units. Meaning a Sei whale might be three whale units and a Minke whale might be, you know, it might take 50 Minke whales to make one blue whale. So 50 Minke would equate to one blue whale. So this was a crazy way to manage whales because each species of whale was different and each species of whale had to be managed by itself. You had to understand the status of the depletion of any species of whale. So I became fascinated with this whole business and while I was the Whaling Commissioner to the United States I have to say that we changed that whole system around from managing the world’s whale populations in terms of blue whale units to managing them on a rational scientific basis and what we did was essentially get an international agreement for what I would call a selective moratorium. Those whales which were most depleted like the blue whale had a total moratorium, it was forbidden to take any, those whales that were only partly depleted, you could take a certain number, but only to a certain point, and as a result of that, I think we will see the restoration of the world’s whale populations and I think that’s an important thing to adopt. 
MR. LARSON: That’s amazing to get that international cooperation. Usually these take decades rather than years.
DR. WHITE: It wasn’t easy, but it’s another example of another class of environmental problems, a common resource problem and the only way you’re going to solve a common resource problem is by getting cooperation and collaboration form the people who depend on that resource. They have to be shown that it’s in their own self-interest to manage themselves, to put restrictions on themselves, to regulate themselves, so that this resource which is so important to all is not destroyed. The, while in NOAA, I became interested, exposed to, and responsible for a range of environmental problems that went way beyond problems of the atmosphere. I became deeply involved in questions of the ocean and not just ocean pollution, that’s predicting the state of the ocean and ocean resources, whether they were fisheries, oil or gas, or magnesia nodules, you name it, I became very deeply involved. As the years passed, I developed a great appreciation of the fragility and sensitivity of the environment. In later years, it’s now a matter that’s in headlines, in matter of common conversation; we began to encounter a new class of environmental problem. It was a class of an environmental problem where the effects of the alteration of the environment were visited not on ourselves, but either downstream in time or space, by that I mean, we had become concerned with the sort of local or regional nature of environmental problems, that is an aquifer would be contaminated, or a river would be polluted, or a city would have an air pollution control arrangement, these were all sort of local environmental problems as the people who were doing the contamination, who were doing the polluting, were also the people who would benefit, or suffer from whatever you did with that situation. A new class of environmental problems arose and that class is typified by things like the acid rain problem, by the carbon dioxide inclined problem, the fact that through fossil fuel burning you’re increasing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and as a result of that the predictions are that the climate will warm up with the consequences that we have yet to foresee, but may very well be adverse. 
MR. LARSON: Are there any examples of changes that have taken place say over the last 50 years that can be traced to, you might say, industrialization. I refer to Francis, California, I had lived there during the ‘30’s and remember in July I think, we had one rain in 12 years that I was there. Now apparently it’s common to have rains in July. People do claim that the weather is different now. I don’t know if whether this can be a normal variation, or…
DR. WHITE: If there is any predictable characteristic of the weather is that it will be different. 
MR. LARSON: Yes. 
DR. WHITE: But I can’t answer your question unless I know more about it. You asked the question: do we have any evidence that industrialization, or I don’t think we should pin it on industrialization, it’s what we do ourselves as humans, in humanity, but a lot of it has to do with industrialization. But a lot of it doesn’t. For example if you fill in the wetlands along the Chesapeake Bay for condominiums, for recreational purposes, you destroy the habitat of fish that spawn there. What humanity is doing, we can see the evidences in terms of health effects. Those are evidence from all the chemicals that are introduced in the environment. I’m not going to talk here about health effects. Those are well documented in many cases and I think that the other concern about these things is very deep, very widespread; we have systems of dealing with them. I’m talking about impacts on the environment as a contrast with impacts on human health. Acid rain is a good example. It’s quite clear and quite certain now that both in the northeast part of the United States and Scandinavia, fresh water lakes are adversely affected. There acidity has increased. As a result of greater acidity of course they lose their fish populations. The, we know this is due to increased sulfur dioxide, oxides, and nitrogen in the atmosphere and there is no question that these are due to emissions, industrial emissions, or emissions from automobiles. So, we have evidence that we are impacting the environment in significant ways. We can make calculations about the effects of fluoride carbons, those on the stratosphere. And why we can measure it, as in the case of acid rain, all calculations indicate that we will have in fact a reducing amount of ozone in the stratosphere if the amount of fluoride carbons continues.
MR. LARSON: Is that, the fluoride carbon in the upper atmosphere being monitored on a continuing basis now? 
DR. WHITE: There are measurements being made by a number of groups on reaction rates and the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. I don’t know if I would use the word monitored, but there is a lot of research going on the processes of the stratosphere. The biggest, perhaps the grandest of all the environmental dilemmas that we face, and I have used the ultimate environmental dilemma is the one that is posed by the use of fossil fuels, whether that’s coal, gas, or oil. The consumption of fossil fuels of course releases carbon dioxide, the burning releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and we have [inaudible] evidence of course from the NOAA observatory in the South Pole, the observatory in Samoa, or a point there of a very systematic increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that has been about a 16 percent increase over the past half century in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is a serious problem. It’s a serious problem because carbon dioxide is a very strong infrared absorber which means that it absorbs the heat that is radiated from the surface of the earth, essentially transparent solar radiation which means that the energy from the sun down the surface of the earth, then that of course is a warming of the atmosphere near the surface of the earth. So we know what the effect will be and calculations give you what you might expect qualitatively. We can begin to put some numbers on these facts. If we put numbers on these facts then we can come back to the earlier story of the numerical weather prediction. There would be no way for us to even to begin to estimate what the environmental consequences of increased carbon dioxide would be if we did not have numerical weather prediction models and large scale digital computers which originally revolutionized meteorology back around, in the early 1950’s because it is the mathematical models, essentially the same mathematical models used for weather prediction that you can also use for studying the general circulation of atmosphere. You can use these mathematical models to ask questions, what would happen to the circulation of the atmosphere or the temperature of the atmosphere if you increased the carbon dioxide by a certain percentage. So we finally have a tool which can help us answer the question of what would be the consequences. Well, if you look at what these mathematical models now predict based upon some projected rates of energy usage around the world, what they predict is sometime around the middle of the next century you will get an increase in the average temperature near the surface of the earth of the order of three degrees centigrade. Now there is an error around that, anywhere from two degrees to four degrees, one and a half degrees to four degrees, but let’s use the number three degrees centigrade. Now you may say that’s not a whole lot, a big temperature change, three degrees. Well if you realize that the transition from an ice age to an ice-free age only involves an average temperature of six degrees centigrade you begin to get the idea that a three degrees centigrade difference is a very significant difference. Well when will the three degrees centigrade change take place? Well that goes with the doubling of the carbon dioxide. If you quadruple the amount of carbon dioxide you essentially get double the effect. You get six degrees centigrade. 
MR. LARSON: That’s amazing, now of course we have had reversals of this in history, say I think it was from 1100 to 1200 Greenland’s temperature decreased. Was that caused by a two or three, it wiped out the settlements of the Vikings over those two centuries, was that probably a two degree, four degree average change in temperature in the world at that time? I was wondering if you have both positive and negative changes, of natural origin.
DR. WHITE: You’re referring to what is now known as the Little Ice Age. 
MR. LARSON: Oh, I didn’t realize it was called that. 
DR. WHITE: Yes. It’s called the Little Ice Age and it was a time when the Norse settlements in Greenland were closed down because of the inability to go across the frozen ocean. People estimate that to be up to a one degree centigrade change.
MR. LARSON: Oh, is that all?
DR. WHITE: Average, overall.
MR. LARSON: Very important.
DR. WHITE: Now let’s assume that the mathematical models project a three degree centigrade change by the middle of next century, maybe a little later than the middle of the next century, but the question you have to ask yourself is what would the consequences be? Well, I wish one could answer in detail what the consequences would be, but nobody really knows. The mathematical models however good aren’t good enough. They aren’t precise enough to give you the regional distribution of temperature changes, or precipitation changes, but we do know some things. We do know that the temperature in the polar regions would go up by almost twice as much as they would in the more equatorial regions, so that you would have a very large increase in temperature in the polar regions and you would have very little temperature decrease in the lower equatorial regions. Well if you think about that that happens to us every year. When you go from winter to summer, or summer to winter, or winter to summer, put it that way, what happens is the temperature down in Barbados and Panama remain roughly the same. There is no change there. But the temperatures up there in Nome, Alaska, go from very low to very high. 
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. WHITE: So essentially you have a greater warming in the polar regions than you do in the equatorial regions. What does that say? That says that if indeed these predictions are true about the carbon dioxide, and I have to emphasize the large uncertainty as well there, then what would happen to our global atmospheric circulation is become more summer like. Well then you have to ask yourself what happens in the summer time. You see, I started out by saying that the basic thing that drives the circulation of the atmosphere is the difference in temperature between equatorial regions and the polar regions. Now what carbon dioxide, increased carbon dioxide will do is change that temperature difference, it will make it smaller. If it makes it smaller then that’s what you have in the summer time. What happens in the summer time? Well storm tracks tend to move further north, and if you sit here in Washington D.C. of course you swelter. The reason you swelter is that you’re in the middle of the Bermuda high, or the edge of the Bermuda high. The high pressure areas that are generally located in subtropical regions generally move north and the storm tracks move further north. In short, the polar front has its normal seasonal trek from more southerly latitudes to more northerly latitudes. Well, if you ask yourself the question then if you had more summer time like circulation then your storm tracks move further north it’s likely that and nobody can say with any certainty, it’s likely that you would see greater desecration in latitudes of the United States because the precipitating elements, the storms would be further north. What it means of course is that some countries will turn out to be winners and some countries will turn out to be losers. Agriculture is very, very versatile. We can develop strains of grain that could survive in almost any temperature conditions. What we can’t do is develop strains of grain that can live without water, well, somewhat. But water is really the key thing so that if you change your precipitation regimes you’ve either got to change your agricultural regimes, what the consequences will be we really don’t know, but you can begin to see that this brings about some very, very substantial changes in our global environment, and in all the things dependent on the environments. Civilizations have adjusted to certain kinds of climatic conditions and civilizations are going to have to adjust to somewhat different kinds of climatic conditions. So, we come sort of to a logical pause for this story. It’s almost where we started in that by bringing meteorology from art to science by getting a capability to model the atmosphere, by getting capability to observe the atmosphere, we’re in the position, and none too soon to begin to understand what the consequences are of humanity’s doing something to the atmospheric conditions and doing it on a global basis. 
MR. LARSON: It’s absolutely necessary to do it on an international or global basis…
DR. WHITE: Absolutely.
MR. LARSON: What one country can do is not compared to what is necessary. 
DR. WHITE: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: Yes. Well this is absolutely fascinating listening of the important problems that face our nation and the worlds as far as that’s concerned.
DR. WHITE: It will be with us for some time. 
MR. LARSON: Yes. Fine. Well can I perhaps get you to expand a little bit on some of your, I know most of your activities have been in this fascinating field, but at the present time of course you have broaden your responsibilities to cover the whole field of engineering as President of the National Academy of Engineering and as, how do you feel about that transition?
DR. WHITE: Well, it’s certainly, I feel good about it. It’s certainly different from anything I’ve ever done before. It’s another way as far as from my view of being able to influence change in a direct course of events, but in quite different ways than being an official in the government, or being a scientist in a laboratory. Being head of the National Academy of Engineering, enables one to step back and take a look at a range of problems that this country will need to look at and face in the years ahead and enables you to be in a position where you can convene the best minds of the country to consider some of these problems. The membership of our academy is a very unusual kind of membership, very distinguished. They are engineers and applied scientists who come from the university community and the industrial community, as well as from government and other institutions. They are the people who to a large extent are responsible for the technological revolution that we are now going through. They are the people who design the space craft and the water supply systems and new materials. They are the working engineers and the deans of schools of engineering. They are the people who are at the core of the technological revolution which is now radically changing the face of society. There is no facet of society that is now not being impacted by technological innovation and change, whether it’s the field of education, or foreign affairs, or health, or environment. Every one of these societal functions are being radically transformed now by the technological changes that are now taking place. These are technological changes that involve, you know, computers, communication, electronics, materials, the whole range of innovative techniques and approach to materials that now envelop us. The National Academy of Engineering is in a remarkable position to contribute to the public understanding of what is happening to us, what the impact of these technological changes and innovations are in our society. We are in a remarkable position, because of our membership, to consider some of the key problems that are going to affect the welfare of the country, the whole question of industrial competitiveness, industrial productivity. This is at the core of employment problems in this country, what is going to be the nature of the work force, what will be the impact of what a cold high-technology industry upon the work force, upon employment, what would happen to our more core mature industries in this very, very competitive world and given the membership we have in our academy, it allows us to begin to think about some of these problems and examine them and treat them and increase public understanding of them. 
MR. LARSON: This is very important, particularly the fact that we look for these quick fixes on some of these problems of our changing industrial society and we need to take a much more comprehensive and longer range approach to these problems. 
DR. WHITE: I think that’s what we can do in the Academy of Engineering. I think we are in a position to look at some of these problems. 
[End of Interview]