Extreme weather events are getting more frequent and more extreme, and atmospheric scientists are studying what’s going on in the air around us, especially in regard to storms. One of the leaders in that effort is Joshua Wurman, who celebrates his 64th birthday today.
Wurman was born in Pennsylvania, in the US, to Gloria Nagy, a novelist, and Richard Saul Wurman, who (among other things) founded the TED Conferences and TED Talks. He attended MIT, where he earned both Masters and Doctoral degrees in meteorology. He then joined the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and later joined the faculty at the Unversity of Oklahoma.
Wurman’s motivation for moving to Oklahoma might have had something to do with the weather there; Oklahoma experiences relatively frequent tornadoes. Wurman was one of the first “storm chasers” to study those storms, and invented the Doppler On Wheels system, which is a portable weather radar station mounted on a truck. He built the first unit out of spare parts, and has since constructed eight more. In addition to the DOW, Wurman invented the bistatic radar system which separates the transmitter from the receiver (by miles) in order to better image the weather phenomena in between the two. He has since enhanced bistatic radar into “multiple-Doppler arrays,” which use the same principles and further increase image quality.
Wurman has made a number of discoveries in meteorological research, including “sub-kilometer hurricane boundary layer rolls” and “hurricane tornado-scale vortices.” Please feel free to look those up on your own; I have no clue. He also leads the tornado observation project called ROTATE, which is one of those made-up acronyms that supposedly stands for “Radar Observations of Tornadoes And Thunderstorms Experiment.” He’s published extensively in Science, the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Monthly Weather Review, the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, Weather and Forecasting, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
It’s probably lucky that Wurman went into meteorology instead of, say, marketing, because another one of his projects features another awkward acronym: FARM, which stands for “Flexible Array of Radars and Mesonets.” A “mesonet” is a network of weather radar stations. But he’s active in popular culture nevertheless, appearing on the reality TV series Storm Chasers, the documentaries Tornado Intercept and The True Face of Hurricanes, as well as the IMAX film Forces of Nature. He can be seen in a number of other documentaries and science programs presented by PBS, the BBC, the Weather Channel, and more. And today he’ll probably be blowing out candles on his birthday cake, but maybe not before observing the tiny atmospheric vortex created above a candle flame.
