Warren M. Washington

A Biography by Martha Davidson, AAHP Research Associate (2/11/2009)

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Meteorologist Warren M. Washington is one of the first scientists who devised ways of studying the effect of human activity on the global climate. He has been an advisor to six presidents and to Congress on matters of climate change. As a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he shared the 2007 Nobel Prize with Al Gore. He traces the source of his interest in science to his family, his teachers, and his innate curiosity about how things work.

 He was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1936, into a religious family that valued education. His parents, Edwin Washington and Dorothy Morton, had both attended college, and one of his grandfathers, though self-educated, instilled in the younger generations a respect for and love of learning. Church also played an important role in Warren’s childhood.  He still recalls members of their congregation prodding him by asking, “Boy, what are you going to do with yourself?”[1]

 Warren’s father, Edwin Washington, was originally from Birmingham, Alabama. After studying history at Talledega College, he’d fled the South in search of greater opportunities, eventually settling in Portland. Even there, employment possibilities for African Americans were limited. Edwin Washington worked as a railroad porter, and Warren’s mother, who had studied music at the University of Oregon, devoted herself to her family.

The family faced hostility when they moved to a predominately white neighborhood. Blacks formed only a tiny fraction of Oregon’s population in that period, yet were restricted by segregation laws. “The issue of inequality was a big factor in my development as I grew up in Portland. . . . Even in the 1940s and 1950s, African Americans were being turned away from restaurants and hotels,” Washington states in his memoir, Odyssey in Climate Modeling, Global Warming, and Advising Five Presidents. [2] 

But in reading, he felt tremendous freedom. He devoured books from the local library and found inspiration in biographies of scientists uch as Thomas Edison, George Washington Carver, and Albert Einstein. “Books about these and other outstanding individuals led me to the simple conclusion that most scientists came from ordinary families. They used persistence and hard work to achieve their goals,”[3] Washington says, adding that many of those successful individuals encountered and overcame difficult obstacles in their lives.

As a boy, he participated in Scouts, had a paper route, and when he was old enough, got an after-school job as a dishwasher and janitor at a hospital. It paid 72 cents an hour, but he was able to save enough to buy his first car, a secondhand 1936 Ford, for $75.  As a teenager in the 1950s, Washington was stirred by the struggles of the growing civil rights movement. In high school, he joined the Junior NAACP and served as vice-president of his chapter. “This . . . was a valuable learning experience for the young people, especially for me,” he says. “It taught us to be active in helping shape our futures. It helped give me confidence that I could contribute to making a change.” [4]

It was in high school, too, that his interest in science intensified. It was sparked by a chemistry teacher who gave impressive lab demonstrations and encouraged students to discuss their observations. That teacher would not answer simple questions, but insisted that the students research the information themselves. A physics course engaged Washington even more. The physics teacher’s demonstrations and clear explanations of physics principles gave Washington insight into how nature works. The impact was powerful, and Washington decided he wanted to major in physics when he went to college.

It was not a simple decision.  Although his family and church community had high expectations for Washington, his guidance teacher tried to dissuade him from going to college, steering him instead to business training.  Washington noticed that other bright African American students in his math and science classes were not pursuing higher education, largely because they could not envision themselves in college. He ignored peer pressure and his guidance teacher’s advice and enrolled in the physics program at Oregon State College in Corvallis, Oregon.

To pay his tuition, he’d found a hospital job in Corvallis, and to save money, he transferred from the freshman dorm to a cooperative.  In the summers, he took on other work, including a stint as a “repo” man, repossessing cars from owners who had defaulted on loans. It was risky work, but well paid.  Nonetheless, running short of money one day, he phoned home to ask his mother to send him funds from his savings account. His grandfather, who was very ill from cancer, answered the phone and immediately got out of bed to go to his own bank and send the money. This incident, which demonstrated his grandfather’s a deep commitment to college education, made a lasting impression on Washington.

Of the four thousand students then enrolled at the college, only about ten were black. The first African American student had graduated just a few years earlier.  The most blatant discrimination was in the fraternities and sororities, which did not accept black members.  Washington instead joined a local chapter of the largely black Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

The physics department, however, was outstanding. Classes were small, and the faculty insisted that students in the program understand every aspect of physics. Washington struggled to learn it all, but later valued that approach to education. “I had no fear of tackling something new, because with a solid foundation in the fundamentals of physics one could tackle almost anything.” [5]

The core of his work was in meteorology, the study of atmospheric phenomena. He also took a lot of math courses, including applied mathematics. One of the courses was in programming for an early model computer, the ALWAC. After graduating with a B.S. in physics in 1958, he remained at Oregon State to pursue a master’s degree in general science with an emphasis in meteorology.

Since the early twentieth century, meteorologists had used mathematical equations to describe patterns of heat, motion, and humidity for weather prediction. In the 1920s, a new system was introduced. It divided a geographical area into a grid of cells and assigned numbers to the air pressure, temperature, and other atmospheric qualities in each cell. Drawing on the data from different cells, meteorologists could in theory use equations to predict weather, but the overwhelming number of computations that would be required made it impractical until computers were developed.  By the mid-1950s, there were breakthroughs in using computers to create models of atmospheric conditions and to make forecasts, but there was still much to be discovered.

Washington’s thesis concerned mountain clouds and air waves, and he used the ALWAC III-E to solve equations that described their forces and patterns. While in that graduate program, he got a job doing mathematical analysis for a physicist named Fred Decker. One phase of the work involved operating a high-elevation weather radar situated on a mountaintop in deep snow, where Washington spent many winter weekends alone.

That job led to another, in the summer of 1959, at the Stanford Research Institute. Working under Manfred Holl, a noted theoretician, Washington learned to do objective analysis of data.  When he completed his master’s degree, he applied to Ph.D. programs at other schools. Several of them accepted him, offering him assistantships that would cover his tuition and living expenses.  Pennsylvania State University’s Ph.D. program offered him a job that paid only $200 a month, a meager salary even at that time, but he chose it because it had a U.S. Air Force project that used atmospheric computer modeling and analysis.

Washington had married by that time, and he made the cross-country trip to Penn State by car with his wife, newborn daughter, and his in-laws. At Penn State, one of his professors was an eminent and brilliant astrophysicist and meteorologist named Hans Panofsky. Panofsky was one of the pioneers in using computers to forecast weather.

The program had other outstanding professors as well and gave Washington a broad education. Washington chose an extremely difficult thesis topic and had to narrow it to one that he could really tackle. It had to do with relationships of temperatures and wind fields recorded at irregular geographical locations. Using mathematics, he had to find a way to record the data from very dynamic wind-temperature relationships on a regular grid that could be used on a computer. Another part of his thesis was to program a simplified global atmospheric model that could run on the computers of that time.  The program would be used to test methods of analysis.

He completed his thesis and oral exams in 1963 and received his Ph.D. the following spring. Only one other African American before himCharles E. Anderson, a 1960 graduate of MIT, had earned a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences.  Anderson later became Washington’s mentor and friend.

Once he completed his exams, Washington had to make a critical choice. He was offered two positions: one with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California, and the other with a new organization in Boulder, Colorado the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).  His wife was from California, near Monterrey, and the Naval Postgraduate School offered him $12,000; NCAR could offer him only $9,000. After discussing the pros and cons with other scientists and his wife, Washington took the lower-paying job at NCAR. The prospect of being part of an organization that was just getting started appealed to him.

With a second child on the way, his wife flew to Boulder and Washington drove there by himself, hauling a trailer of their possessions. Stopping at a motel, he watched the 1963 Civil Rights March on television and was stirred by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “I Have a Dream” speech. “The event had a profound effect on me,” Washington states. “It renewed my commitment to continue to strive for equality for all people.” [6]

At NCAR, Washington was to spend half his time on a project that was important to the Center and the other half on work of his own choosing. The workplace was informal and it fostered collaboration among the many outstanding scientists on the staff. Working closely with other scientists, Washington focused for several years on creating a better computer model for studying the atmosphere on a global scale. Scientists at other government agencies and academic institutions were also working on the problem.

The computers Washington and his associates worked with were large mainframes with vacuum tubes, primitive by today’s standards, requiring many hours to test their programs. Sometimes the team ran the models twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; in the end, they were successful. The result of their research was called the General Circulation Model. The first version was essentially completed by 1968. It enabled scientists to make realistic predictions of weather systems, such as the summer monsoons in India and other parts of Asia. The General Circulation Model and its successors were tools widely used by universities and other centers studying atmospheric conditions, and they were the basis for later, more comprehensive computer models for studying climate change.

In the 1970s, more people began to question the human impact on climate, particularly regarding energy and the use of fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide into the air. In 1978 Washington, by then a senior scientist at NCAR, was asked to be the principal investigator of a project for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).  The project used an enhanced version of the NCAR computer model to study global warming and other impacts of energy use. 

That project has continued to the present day and has led to even more sophisticated climate models developed to run on supercomputers. Washington’s team at NCAR, in collaboration with scientists at the DOE and at several universities, created the Climate System Model (CSM), which incorporated not just atmospheric data, but also data on oceans, land surfaces, and sea ice. Introduced in 1996, CSM was improved even further by a larger network of scientists; the result was called the Community Climate System Model (CCSM). CCSM has been a major tool for studying climate simulations for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

For example, in 2003, Washington co-chaired a group that simulated climate changes from 1870 to the year 2200, studying the relative impacts of an array of natural forces (such as solar energy and volcanic explosions) and human factors (including greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and chemicals released by aerosols).

As he advanced in his career, Washington mentored a younger generation of scientists. In 1986, he co-authored with Claire Parkinson a graduate-level textbook that has become a classic: An Introduction to Three-Dimensional Climate Modeling (University Science Books). The authors updated the book in a new edition that was published in 2005. It points the way to a future all-encompassing computer simulation, the Earth System Model, which would add biological processes such as nitrogen and carbon cycles to the complexities of the Community Climate System Model.

Throughout his career, Washington remained devoted to his family. Divorced from his first wife, he remarried in 1978, but lost his second wife to cancer in 1987. One of his seven children (four from his first marriage and three stepchildren) died in an auto accident the same year. As a single parent, Washington saw that his children all made it through college, and he takes pride in his many grandchildren. In 1994 he married Mary Curtis, who had two grown children, one of whom died in 2002.

While continuing his work at NCAR, Washington has been very active with professional societies and scientific panels. He is a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Engineering. By presidential appointment he has served on the President’s National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmospheres, and he was active on the National Science Board for twelve years, including four years as chairman. In those capacities, he has advised Congress and every president from Jimmy Carter through Barack Obama on important issues of climate change, aquaculture, and initiatives for scientific research and education. In 2007 Senator Obama asked Washington to join him on a panel to discuss climate change impacts on minorities. Since that time, Washington has served on a commission that is giving President Obama and Congress advice on climate change issues. A Fellow and past president of the American Meteorological Society, Washington influenced the organization to establish a board on women and minorities to expand opportunities and recruit a more diverse population to the profession. 

Washington was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change whose efforts were recognized, along with those of Albert A. Gore, Jr., by the Norwegian Nobel Committee:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change. . . . Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming. . . .

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control. [7]

Reflecting on his long journey in science, Washington has written that “scientists are usually optimist[s] . . . , driven by the excitement of searching for increased knowledge. I have been blessed by having the privilege to work on a very important societal issue . . . . I am pleased that my research colleagues and I were some of the leaders in both modeling and understanding present and future climate change.” [8]