“When I was young I always knew I wanted to be a meteorologist.” an interview with William Putman

Description

William Putman, research meteorologist with NASA , was always fascinated by the way meteorologists on television could predict what was going to happen. But instead of comparing weather reports with the blowing of the trees outside his house, Putman now works in the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which integrates all of the agency’s Earth-observing instruments and has made considerable improvements to the rudimentary forecasts predicted by the meteorologists of his youth.

But Putman says the advances haven’t stopped. By the end of his career, he hopes to be able to predict storms and weather at a very fine scale from multiple weeks out. “That’s the kind of thing I hope to get to before my career’s over. Right now we’re about a factor of 10 away from that,” he says. (Recorded 11 December 2018)

Participants

• William Putman
  
• Josh Learn
  
• AGU Narratives
  

Interview By

• AGU Narratives