Jerome Namias; Long-Range Weather Prediction Pioneer

Jerome Namias, a pioneering weather forecaster who helped time the Allied invasion of North Africa in World War II, has died. He was 86.

Namias, veteran chief of the extended forecast section of the U.S. Weather Bureau and later a research meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, died Monday of pneumonia at Scripps Torrey Pines Convalescent Hospital in San Diego. His work had been restricted since he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1989.

The visionary scientist earned a citation from the secretary of the Navy in 1943 after he advised Allied commanders on the most favorable weather conditions for the assault on North Africa. He provided forecasts for the Navy and the Army throughout World War II.

In more recent years, Namias predicted warmer than normal weather at the time of the Arab oil embargo, which encouraged the government to forgo implementing gasoline rationing. He was among the first meteorologists to assess the influence of the warm Pacific Ocean surface current called El Nino on North American weather.

“Namias was a central figure in the development of long-range weather forecasting and studies of air-sea interaction in the United States,” said Dr. William A. Nierenberg, director emeritus of Scripps Institution. “He was one of a small group that first recognized the fundamental connection between oceans and climate, and his work is a classic example of a bridge between basic science and applied research.”

Born in Bridgeport, Conn., Namias said high school teachers focused him on meteorology, which became his vocation and “a most challenging hobby.” As a teenager, he began making observations in his backyard and studying weather maps.

After earning degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan, he went to Washington and the Weather Bureau in 1941. He joined Scripps as head of its Climate Research Group in 1971.

By 1940, Namias was making five-day weather forecasts and by 1948 he made successful 30-day advance forecasts. From the beginning, he made an effort to link abstract weather predictions with practical results. He predicted during a speaking tour of Southern California in 1950 that, eventually, long-range weather forecasting would save millions of lives by timing crop harvests and the marketing of commodities.

Namias said in 1951: “I am just enough of an optimist about this business to believe that our generation will yet see annual and even decade forecasting.”

In the early 1950s, he said, meteorologists were thwarted in making longer than 30-day forecasts by a lack of vast hemisphere-wide weather data, by inadequate understanding of the interactions of upper-altitude air flows and other weather components, and by lack of a “mechanical brain” to make massive computations. But solutions evolved and by the 1980s, Namias was making 90-day forecasts with a 65% success rate.

Namias is survived by his wife Edith, of La Jolla, and a daughter, Judith Immenschuh of Fairfax, Calif.