October 2001

Random Profile: Rich Rotunno

Rich Rotunno and his wife, Gayl Gray. They met in the ML library. (Photo by Carlye Calvin.)

Every other month, Staff Notes Monthly spotlights a stochastically chosen staff member. This month we profile Richard Rotunno, a senior scientist in the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division.

Man in the middle:

Rich has been carrying out research at NCAR since he arrived as a postdoc in 1976. He focuses on mesoscale phenomena—tornadoes, squall lines, gust fronts, and the like. The prefix "meso" means middle, which gives Rich plenty of leeway to shift to smaller or larger scales. "I've worked in just about every area of mesoscale research. There's a very broad middle."

It wasn't always weather:

As a youngster, Rich wasn't spellbound by the sky, as so many colleagues were. Instead, "I loved reading books—history, literature." Rich's family moved from Manhattan to central Long Island in 1957, when one could still find a duck farm or a deserted beach to explore. He decided to go into engineering, "mainly because I thought it would be a good living." Rich attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook, earning his undergraduate degree in engineering science with an eye toward aeronautical engineering.

The road to NCAR:

Rich's mentor at SUNY-Stony Brook was engineering professor Robert Cees, who "got me into research." Cees was also the one who delivered life-altering news to Rich and his classmates one morning in April 1971. "Congress had decided to veto the supersonic transport [which would have been the American equivalent to the Concorde]. Bob came in and said 'I don't know if you have to know any of this stuff—supersonic flow theory—any more.' " With the job market for aerospace engineers suddenly kaput, "I decided to retool. I knew I liked fluid mechanics, and environmental fluid mechanics seemed to be happening."

The natural place for Rich to take up graduate studies was Princeton University. It had close ties to the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory—the birthplace of numerical weather prediction. "Bill Holland [now retired from CGD] taught the oceanography course I took." Gradually, Rich's interest shifted toward the atmosphere, and upon finishing his doctorate he headed west to Boulder and NCAR.

He was a chaser before chasing was cool:

As an ASP postdoc, Rich hooked up with mentor Doug Lilly in the Small-Scale Analysis and Prediction Program. The program was then housed on the mesa and separate from the Convective Storms Division; the two entities would later merge to form MMM. Rich quickly became entranced by the mysterious physics driving tornadoes: "It had a lot of gut appeal." In 1977, Doug took a sabbatical at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences to plan a field project, and Rich followed. At CIRES, Rich continued using numerical simulations to study vortex flows that were created in tornado chambers at the University of Oklahoma and Purdue University.

On a trip to Oklahoma, Rich also got a taste of storm chasing. The field was then limited to a handful of people who had very little data to work with. "Chasing was kind of a primitive thing in those days. I remember having to stop at a phone booth and call someone who'd rattle off data from the surface charts. No Weather Channel, no laptops." Despite the limitations, he managed to see his first tornado at Shamrock, Texas, on 9 May 1977.

Peak research experience:

Rich's modeling collaboration in the early 1980s with MMM colleague Joe Klemp on the three-dimensional structure of supercell thunderstorms was "a confluence of events. Computers were becoming fast enough and we were becoming bold enough to ask, Why can't we simulate a 3-D thunderstorm?" Their analysis became a touchstone for other work and is still part of the training for weather forecasters and other specialists. "Not only did we discover some new things about tornadic storms, [but] those discoveries had some practical use as well. It's satisfying as an engineer to make something that people use." On the tropical cyclone front, Rich earned the AMS Banner I. Miller Award in 1992 for his paper with Kerry Emanuel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on the relationship between sea-surface temperature and the inner dynamics of hurricanes.

Kismet in the stacks:

When Rich walked into the ML library one day in 1977, he didn't know he was about to meet his future life partner, Gayl Gray (now NCAR's acting chief librarian). "I was asking for a report by Ted Fujita. I think it was on the Fargo tornado [of 1957]. I think it only existed as a tech memo. She had to do some searching, but she found it, and we've lived happily ever after."

Bella Italia:

Gayl and Rich both love to travel. In 1992, they went to Agrigento, Sicily, where they met members of Rich's extended family. Another family reunion happened in Milan two years ago while Rich was taking part in the Mesoscale Alpine Project. The couple's other favorite destinations include any place with ocean waves and sandy beaches.

The never-ending reading list:

A true bibliophile, Rich swaps books and recommendations with MMM colleagues Charlie and Nancy Knight and other friends. He favors histories, essays, novels, and short stories, including Italian literature. "Richard Burton had a diary of all the books he'd read. I used to want to do that—but if I started right now, I'd neglect all the ones I read before. So I've never started one."

• Bob Henson

Edited by David Hosansky, hosansky@ucar.edu
Prepared for the Web by Jacque Marshall
Last revised: Thu Oct 25 11:18:36 MDT 2001