David Atlas

Dr. David Atlas is one of the founding fathers of radar meteorology. There is scarcely an area within the field that he has not significantly influenced. After serving as one of the first U.S.
Army Air Corps radar meteorologists during World War II, Dr. Atlas spent 18 years as the chief of the U.S. Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories' Weather Radar Branch in Bedford, Massachusetts, where he foresaw the importance of Doppler in weather radar and studied its use to measure winds. He was a professor of meteorology at the University of Chicago from 1966 to 1972, and he directed the Atmospheric Technology Division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at Boulder, Colorado from 1972 to 1976. His efforts at NCAR led to major advancements in weather radar use and paved the way for the National Weather Service and the FAA to use Doppler radar to measure severe weather.  In 1977, Dr. Atlas became founding director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric Sciences at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. There, he drove the development of space-based instruments for monitoring the earth's atmosphere, oceans and cryosphere. Since retiring in 1994, he continues his research at Goddard as a Distinguished Visiting Scientist.

Dr. Atlas is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Society, the U.K. Royal Meteorological Society, and the American Meteorological Society (AMS), serving as AMS president in 1975. His honors include the Royal Meteorological Society's Symons Gold Medal. A member of
the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, Dr. Atlas holds 22 patents and has published more than 260 papers.