Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
In 1956, National Academy of Sciences president Detlev Bronk
appointed a National Research Council Committee on Meteorology to
“consider and recommend means by which to increase our understanding
and control of the atmosphere.”
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The committee included Lloyd Berkner,
Carl-Gustav Rossby, Jule Charney, John von Neumann, Edward Teller,
Roger Revelle (in an informal advisory role), and a number of other lumi-
naries of meteorology and Cold War science. The committee noted a
shortage of training, personnel, and dedicated resources in the study of the
atmosphere.
52
Meteorological research was fragmented and the discipline
was underprofessionalized: 90 percent of American meteorologists were
government employees trained by the air force during the Second World
War, and the vast majority of these more than twenty thousand military
men had no doctorates.
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The nature of the subject matter, meanwhile,
required a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach, often using expensive,
large-scale equipment that was at the time unavailable to most scholars.
54
In early 1958, with the International Geophysical Year underway, the com-
mittee recommended that the federal government increase overall finan-
cial support for basic atmospheric research and that the NSF underwrite
the establishment of a National Institute of Atmospheric Research (NIAR,
later changed to NCAR) to coordinate and conduct this research.
55
Though the Committee on Meteorology recommended federal funding
for NIAR, it strongly suggested that the new institution be run by represen-
tatives from meteorology departments at American universities rather than
by government bureaucrats. The committee's vision for a university-based
research program reflected an ambivalence about the broader U.S. Cold
War research system. On the one hand, the committee saw NIAR as a way
to take advantage of government money in order to address a constellation
of scientific, civilian, and military concerns, all at least ostensibly in the
service of the state. Committee members recognized that only the federal
government could provide the resources and facilities scientists needed to
approach the “fundamental problems of the atmosphere on a scale com-
mensurate with their global nature and importance.”
56
Airplanes loaded
with atmospheric-monitoring devices; expensive ground-based instru-
ments, including powerful telescopes and coronographs; and access to new
technologies like computers and satellites outstripped the financial capa-
bilities of even the most well-endowed universities. Funding would have
to come from the government research establishment— the Department of
