Morris Neiburger, Air Pollution Authority

Morris Neiburger, a founding member of the UCLA meteorology department and a consultant on air pollution and cloud physics to many private businesses and public institutions for more than three decades, has died at Stanford University Hospital following heart surgery.

Neiburger was 75 and was chairman of the UCLA department (now the department of atmospheric sciences) from 1956 to 1962.

He had originally planned to be a physicist but joined the then-U.S. Weather Bureau in Chicago in 1930. In 1941 he helped Jakob A. B. Bjerknes (son of Vilhelm F. K. Bjerknes, a pioneer in the science of meteorology) found the UCLA department.

Over the years he was an adviser to the World Meteorological Assn., the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District and the state Department of Water Resources.

In the 1940s Neiburger was one of the first to speak out against backyard trash burning as a way to reduce the smog that was beginning to plague the Los Angeles Basin. Short of leveling the Rockies and banning the internal combustion engine, he said at the time, it was one of the few effective steps that could be taken.

A former president of the American Meteorological Society and foreign member of Great Britain’s Royal Meteorological Society, Neiburger retired from UCLA in 1978. He is survived by his wife, Anastasia, and a son, Carl. He died Feb. 9.