Roger Daley 
meteorologist

"Don't worry if you have not made a choice of career. It can come anytime from grade school to graduate school. But for a career in the natural sciences you will need a strong curiosity about the world around you, and an ability to analyze and describe what you see. Mathematics provides the basis for all the sciences, even environmental science, so get a good foundation in math."

The Person

Birthdate January 25, 1943
Birthplace London, England, grew up in West 
                     Vancouver, BC.
Residence Concord, Ontario
Office Atmospheric Environment Service, Downsview, 
             Ont. M3H 5T4

Family Members
  ¥ Spouse Lucia Tudor Daley
  ¥ Mother Mary Daley
  ¥ Father Eric Daley
  ¥ Children Kate, Charlie

Title Chief Scientist, Atmospheric Environment Service of Canada

Distinction Principal constructor of the Canadian numerical weather forecasting system (1972-78)

Status Working. Present project concerns the estimation of atmospheric windfields based on satellite measurements of minor atmospheric chemical constituents

Degrees
  ¥ B.Sc. (hon.) 1964, UBC in Honours Physics;
  ¥ M.Sc. 1966, McGill, Training as weather forecaster
  ¥ PhD 1971, McGill, Modeling convective clouds

Awards 
  ¥ Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1993)
  ¥ Outstanding Scientist (National Centre for      
     Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado) 1994

Mentor Prof. Robert Stewart

Character Curious, hard-working

Favourite Music Handel's Water Music

Other Interests 
  ¥ History 
  ¥ Family
  ¥ Travel

The Story

Roger Daley received a bachelors degree in physics, but decided to become a weatherman. "I wanted to do something practical with my education, something that would help people in ordinary life," says Daley. The physics of weather seemed more practical to him than nuclear physics, for instance. Canada educates weathermen for free, but afterwards you "pay it back" by going where ever they send you. Roger was posted to the remote Goose Bay weather station in Labrador (actually a U.S. airforce base at the time). This was part of his apprenticeship in the Canadian Weather Service.

Goose Bay, Labrador 1996. Daley is lonely, spending a lot of time alone in his humble room in the army barracks. It's cold and there's not much to do. The smell of jet fuel is all pervasive and the Delta Dagger Interceptors and KC 135 tankers roar overhead at all hours of day and night. They support and refuel B52 bombers in flight.

Daley decides to try an experiment. Working alone in his room at night, he makes up little blue cards for all the American airmen to fill out while flying missions in the area. From these cards Daley works out a local theory for the behaviour of atmospheric turbulence in the area. He spends a lot of time pouring over maps spread out on his bed late at night, entering the data from the cards onto the maps. The pilots are very interested and cooperative because ultimately knowing the patterns of upper level turbulence along the Labrador coast will help them fly better. They start hanging around his room and talking about the air in which they fly. Daley realizes he loves this research and decides to go back to university to get a degree in meteorology.

History

  ¥ 1966-67 served as weather forecaster at Goose Bay   
     Air Base (USAF), in
     Goose Bay, Labrador.
  ¥ 1971-1992 Amanuensis, Copenhagen U., Denmark
  ¥ 1972-78 Canadian Meterological Centre, Montreal,   
     developing forecast
     models
  ¥ 1978-85 National Center for Atmospheric Research 
      (NCAR), Boulder, CO as senior scientist
  ¥ 1985-present Canadian Climate Centre, Downsview, 
     ON Chief Scientist
  ¥ Wrote the book on atmospheric data analysis (1991)

The Young Scientist

Daley grew up in West Vancouver and the North shore
mountains were his backyard. He climbed, skied and boated a lot. His best subject in high-school was history but he was always good in math. He saw math as a doorway to science, but he never wanted to be a research scientist. He always wanted to do something that related to "normal" life. In grade 12 he had no intention of studying science.

The Science

Meteorology is the study of the earth's atmosphere and weather.

1. Real Earth

The Earth's weather is a very complex system affected by ocean currents, temperature, pressure, wind, and many other things.

2. Weather Satellite

Several Canadian weather satellites detect many of the factors that create weather. They send this information back to Earth.

3. Super computer

A supercomputer in Montreal (Programmed in part by Roger Daley) records and interprets information from the satellite and other sources.

4. Model Earth

The weather computer constructs a model of the earth based on very complicated mathematical formulas. This model can be used to help predict the weather.

Activity

You need
  ¥ a cup of black coffee
  ¥ a little bit of milk or cream
  ¥ a ruler
  ¥ a watch or stopwatch.

Imagine that the whirling coffee represents the motion of air in the atmosphere. The whitish milk represents a trace gas. By following the motion of the milk, knowing the size of the cup and using a stopwatch to measure the passage of time, you can determine the velocity of the moving coffee. How good are your velocity measurements when the milk and coffee become well mixed?

The idea is to stir the coffee very very slowly, then drop milk in slowly. Note how the milk mixes and measure the speed of its rotation. Do this by using the radius (r) (measure the distance from the center to where the drop fell) and formula 2 x pi x r  (pi = 3.14) to get the distance the milk travels in one rotation. Use the watch to time how long one rotation takes. The speed of the whirling mixture is the distance/time. This is how meteorologists work out speed of moving clouds and storms in the upper atmosphere. They have satellites that can "see" certain naturally occurring gasses in the atmosphere, like methane from bogs. They "track" this methane as it moves about in the atmosphere, just like the milk in the coffee cup and figure out wind speeds in the exactly the same way you did in the experiment.

Mystery For Future Generations

Daley hopes future generations will help develop a huge computer system that will be able to model all the geophysical systems in the world. Among other things, such a system would allow us to accurately predict the formation of ozone holes and trends in global warming.

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