by Sarah Dry
For Starr, it was an exceptionally busy time. Soon after David’s birth, she started teaching physics to students at the Illinois Institute of Technology, spending summers at WHOI continuing her research on the cumulus cloud data. She convinced a somewhat reluctant Riehl, who claimed to know little more than she did about these clouds, to supervise her doctoral work. Given this level of activity, it is little wonder that something had to give. That something was her marriage. Joanne and Victor Starr were divorced in 1947, leaving Joanne with a young son to look after and the challenge of maintaining a research career that had barely begun. By now, she was deeply committed to a career in meteorology. Her chances of succeeding were not improved by her status as a divorced mother of a young child. In 1948, she married yet again within the circle of University of Chicago meteorology department, this time to Willem Malkus, a physicist studying for his PhD under Enrico Fermi. Now Joanne Starr Malkus, she received her PhD in 1949, and with it became the first woman in the nation to be awarded the advanced degree in meteorology. Another son, Steven, followed in 1950. All the while, she continued teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology and traveling to Woods Hole in the summers to continue her research on cumulus clouds. Only in 1951 was she offered a paid research position—her first ever such job—at Woods Hole, which had already become a favorite location for both work and home life. At twenty-eight years old, she was returning to the skies she had left as a teenager just nine years earlier, with paid work as a research meteorologist.13
As a mother of two young children, Malkus might have chosen to continue doing the theoretical work on cloud models that she’d already begun. But she would never be satisfied simply analyzing other people’s data, and in any case, there was too little of it to answer the questions she wanted to answer. Years later, she remembered the moment that she realized she would need to do her own airborne studies, during a conversation with Henry Stommel, then a young oceanographer at Woods Hole:
One day we were sitting there sort of talking at the blackboard and beating our heads around. You know we can’t go any farther in this until we get some new observations. Why don’t we see if the Navy still has any of those PBY aircraft and maybe we can not only put back the instruments we had in the Wyman expedition, but also make measurements of a few more things, particularly to get vertical velocities and liquid water . . . We sat around . . . saying “Do we really want to do this, are we willing to commit all the time to undertaking all the instrumentation of the aircraft, and installing the instruments and using screwdrivers, flight tests, calibration tests, and so on.” We finally decided that we had to, there really wasn’t any choice about it; that we were not going to get any farther understanding the physics of clouds with making models of clouds without making further observations and taking what we had learned from previous observations and models. . . . We went into it quite consciously, realizing it was going to eat up a big part of our lives. It was with a certain degree of ambivalence.14
FIG. 5.3. Joanne Malkus analyzing data from the Pacific Cloud Hunt at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, with a long roll of cloud prints draped across the table. Credit: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
FIG. 5.4. Joanne Malkus in a DC-3 on a field trip to the Caribbean from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1956. Credit: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
FIG. 5.5. Joanne Malkus loading instrumentation aboard the Woods Hole Instrumental DC-3 for cloud flights over and near Bermuda, c. 1955, with colleague Andrew Bunker. Credit: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
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She may have been ambivalent, but she did not remain still. She managed to gain access, as she had hoped, to an old navy airplane, and off she went, flying out from Woods Hole into the open skies and open waters south of Cape Cod. The closest tropical waters were near Bermuda, and that is where she headed. She was not alone. The airplane itself was kitted out with as many instruments as could be made to work on it and, in addition to the pilot, there was a photographer on board to help capture the clouds.
The ride was noisy and bumpy, but it was noisier than it was bumpy, and so Malkus and the photographer communicated by written note. She began, “The first run we got should be pretty valuable (fingers crossed) despite other subsequent difficulty. The nose camera contribution will be a vital part—because I do think we did get in to the most active part of the bubble and the film will show that—so things could be one whale of a lot worse!!” The response followed, written just below: “But how about the lens being ‘less dry’ (courtesy J. S. M.) that it sees nothing but droplets? Ah! The misery of this life (joking, we are in the beautiful tropical atmosphere).” And Joanne came back again: “Silly creature—it didn’t get wet until we first went in the cloud did it???” And received the following response: “Yeah! Yeah, but the PBY didn’t bounce either until we got inside, or at least not much until then.”15
The notes are full of acronyms and banter. J. S. M. is of course Joanne Starr Malkus. The beautiful tropical atmosphere refers to the skies around Bermuda. The PBY is an amphibious plane developed by the navy for use during the war. Attached to it were a number of devices, including a nose camera for recording the size and location of the clouds, as well as a set of instruments for measuring temperature, humidity, and density of the clouds and the surrounding atmosphere as the aircraft stitched its way into and out of the cloud, observing it at a range of altitudes. The plan was to study these clouds in order to better understand how an apparently calm atmosphere could give way periodically to violent storms.16 Flying in and out of the same cloud five or six times, Malkus and her crew performed the seemingly impossible task of fixing a cloud, rendering permanent the evanescent collection of water droplets. Without the airplane and, more specifically, the instrumented airplane, she would never have been able to achieve her objective. Key were the decisive movements of the airplane itself, which traveled not quickly, as might have been expected to capture the evanescent cloud forms, but slowly, to lessen the impact of aircraft speed on the measurements.
The notes describing the challenge of keeping the lens dry and the airplane stable survive because they recorded another similarly evanescent phenomenon—the burgeoning relationship between Malkus and the photographer, a man she referred to only as “C.,” even fifty years later. Malkus kept these notes for the rest of her life because they captured a fleeting moment that mattered deeply to her, the burgeoning moments of a relationship that was to become one of the most important of her life.
FIG. 5.6. Joanne Malkus with the crew of her first research aircraft, which was on loan from the navy to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Credit: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
The first time she’d seen C., she’d felt an instant attraction. It was “truly love at first sight in my case,” she recalled in 1996. “This emotion is still strong 52 years later, 15 years after his death.”17 But this was not a conventional love story. In 1951, when these notes were made, Malkus was married to Willem Malkus. She had met C. when they found themselves working in the same institution, and soon, on the same project. Malkus had learned to see the atmosphere as a place whose tranquility belied a potential for rapid and dramatic change. And so it was with other people. With C., she learned how in an instant a relationship could shift from one of distance to breathtaking intimacy.
She probed her feelings in a diary she kept at the time with the same attention to detail and the same desire to follow an investigation to its logical conclusion that she demonstrated in her cloud studies. She wrote in pencil in a simple black-and-white ruled notebook and addressed her thoughts directly to C. “Why am I planning to write numerous letters to you, when it is highly unlikely that you will ever read them?”18 Her answer to the question was that the diary entries could constitute half of an imaginary conversation with C. “By recording fragments of these,”
she writes, “I, at least, may learn something.” In the same way, by observing a cloud from every angle, she hoped to learn “what makes the cumulus clouds grow, how they grow, what stops them from growing and the role they play in trapping moisture, heat and momentum.”19 For Malkus, learning about people and clouds was similar, requiring many observations taken at many angles. And just as clouds could only be understood in relation to their environments, people could really only be understood in relation to others.
One of the key scientific outcomes of the project was to prove that it was possible, using a slow-flying airplane, to gather useable data about the clouds. A more substantive conclusion, based on that data, was that it seemed to be the case that larger cumulus clouds were formed by the interaction and aggregation of smaller clouds.20 It wasn’t simply that small clouds grew into bigger clouds, in other words, but that big clouds were formed out of the groupings of smaller clouds. That meant that in order to understand clouds, it would be necessary to consider their interactions at multiple scales.
* * *
Malkus now began thinking about how and whether individual clouds and cloud behavior could be connected to larger-scale weather. What, she wanted to know, was the function played by small-scale convection—the movement of hot air—on larger-scale processes such as the movement of air from the tropics into higher latitudes?21 In 1954, she used money from a grant she received to travel to the UK, where she presented her findings and sat in on lectures on cloud physics and precipitation at Imperial College with the aim of establishing “exchange of ideas and persons” in order to bring about “the vitally needed merging of the fields of cloud dynamics and cloud physics.”
Malkus was not alone in wondering about the relationship between scales ranging from the molecular to the planetary or in finding inspiration in Woodcock and Wyman’s data.22 The first glimpses of the complexity of the tropical atmosphere had also fired the imagination of Henry Stommel, then twenty-seven years old and looking for good problems to work on. He wrote his first scientific paper on entrainment, presenting the then-controversial and counterintuitive idea that it was impossible to separate the study of clouds from the study of their surroundings.23 In the mid-1950s, the entire field of meteorology was grappling with the question of scale, some of which had been raised by Stommel’s paper on entrainment.24 Much as oceanographers had once focused on the Gulf Stream as a phenomenon separate from the basin in which it occurred, meteorologists had long focused on clouds as discrete objects that could be analyzed separately from their surroundings. It was becoming apparent that it would never be possible to understand parts of the atmosphere in isolation. Only by looking at the overall circulation could individual parts be truly understood. Or, as Victor Starr had put it, “attempts to formulate ad hoc explanations for individual details of the general circulation without due cognizance of their role as functioning parts of a global scheme” would be doomed to failure. Something more was needed: an appreciation of the total meteorological picture. Meteorologists wanted to know how what happened within clouds affected what happened in the massive storms known as cyclones or anti-cyclones, and how such storms themselves related to the so-called general circulation of the atmosphere. What connections and feedbacks existed, and where did the discontinuities lie? This was a daunting proposition, but in 1951, Starr approvingly noted a new focus on the “essential oneness of the atmosphere which must be studied as an internally integrated and coordinated unit.”25
FIG. 5.7. U.S. Army Air Force meteorologists prepare to launch a hydrogen-filled balloon with a radiosonde that measured temperature, humidity, and pressure. Credit: NOAA Photo Library.
The biggest reason for this change in the kinds of questions meteorologists were asking was the amount of new data becoming available. The airplane was essential, but another airborne device—the radiosonde—proved just as important. It consisted of a hanging basket of meteorological devices connected to a weather balloon that could transmit data on temperature, humidity, and pressure via radio to a receiver on the ground.26 With radiosondes and airplanes, meteorologists could soar up to 30,000 feet into the atmosphere. It was now possible to imagine a global meteorology in which the motions of the entire atmosphere of the entire planet—along both vertical and horizontal dimensions—might be observed. No longer would meteorology be bound simply to a thin slice of atmosphere at ground level or to a specific region, as the Bergen school and the Institute of Tropical Meteorology had been. To transform global data into a global science, however, more than just observations were needed. Both novel theories and new ways of manipulating data were also needed to create what Rossby called, in the title of a landmark 1941 article, the “scientific basis of modern meteorology.”27
* * *
In addition to the airplane and the radiosonde, there was one other great new meteorological instrument of the postwar era which would come to be essential for Malkus, as it would be for nearly every other working meteorologist. By 1946, its moment had arrived. In that year, the New York Times revealed plans for a “new electronic calculator, reported to have astounding potentialities.”28 The machine, measuring some eighteen by twenty feet long, would be capable of performing the “the most incredibly complicated and advanced equations in inconceivably minute fractions of a second.” Though the super-calculator had been initially conceived as a tool for calculating the trajectories of ballistic missiles, almost immediately its meteorological potential came to the fore. John von Neumann, a professor at Princeton and the leading theorizer—and promoter—of electronic computing, argued that it could have “a revolutionary effect” on weather forecasting. These new machines were especially suited to repeating the same set of operations on an ever-changing set of data, precisely the kinds of calculations that were needed to solve the “nonlinear, interactive and difficult” problems that faced those trying to predict the weather.29
For those who had read Richardson’s 1922 paper imagining the processing power of 64,000 human computers, it seemed as if the future had finally arrived. But while Richardson had dreamed only of forecasting the weather, the prospect of controlling weather and even climate was both an exciting and a potentially troubling new twist. The very first news report on the planned supercomputer noted that not only would it soon be possible to forecast the weather more accurately than ever before: It might even make it possible to “do something about the weather.”30 From the start, the purpose of the weather-calculating supercomputer would be to indicate not only likely future weather, “but also the points at which fairly small amounts of energy could be applied to control the weather.”31 The super-calculator, in other words, was always, at least theoretically, a weather-control machine.
Though von Neumann passionately believed in the redemptive possibilities of computing, he understood that fear was as important as hope in generating support for the project. Weather and climate control was a classic dual-use technology. In the right hands, it could lead to the alleviation of drought and famine, safer aviation, and even the improvement of climate for leisure and enjoyment. But it could also be used to wreak havoc on previously unimaginable scales. “Present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more awful,” he warned. “After global climate control becomes possible, perhaps all our present involvements will seem simple.”32 This moment of control, simultaneously feared and anticipated, seemed imminent. Not only was computer power sure to identify the necessary triggers, but the scale of the technological intervention that would be needed to affect climate at the global scale was no greater, von Neumann estimated, than that which had built the railway and other major industries.33
Just as a small nudge could send a boulder caroming down a mountain, relatively small inputs of energy could work on the atmosphere to produce massive effects. “The pull of a trigger is enough to release the energy in an enormous mass of air,” explained a reporter in the New York Times. “Pull the trigger at the right place and we co
uld ride the whirlwind and divert it to regions where it can do no harm.”34,35 A hurricane could potentially be diverted by igniting oil in key locations. Rain could be summoned by sprinkling coal dust on land to absorb heat. The details remained to be worked out, but already in 1947 it seemed clear that “the weather makers of the future are the inventors of calculating machines.”36
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For all the visceral horror and Promethean ambition such climate fantasies provoked, the computer was not only a tool for world-making or -unmaking. It was also a cerebral device that had the potential to extend the realms of thought—rather than action—in previously unimaginable directions. Once brute calculations could be organized along scientific principles, the computer became a tool for thinking about the atmosphere.37 As such, it had the potential to transform meteorology into an experimental science. Not only could the computer enable the sorts of direct modification of weather or climate that could serve as experiments, but something more novel would become possible—a new kind of meteorological thought experiment, also known (with quotes in the original) as a “weather model.” In this way, the computer enabled experiments to be done on a controlled atmosphere, safely removed from the realm of geopolitics where any atmospheric experiments raised special concern in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Nothing in plaster or wood,” as an early commentator clarified, “but something that lies more in the mind and on the plotting board.” This mental space enabled “an assumed earth” to be shaped according to the questions “we wish to ask of it, with an increasingly complex imaginary earth slowly built up of the constituent parts we add to it, a simple ocean, a series of rudimentary mountain ranges, a certain amount of water vapor.” Thanks to the understanding such models facilitated, “we can begin to think of making weather to order on a regional scale.”38 If the model reproduced observed phenomena, it was a good indication the science was on the right track, “just as the birth of a child who resembles a paternal grandfather legitimizes both itself and its father.”39
