Word: weathering
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Swedish Compliments. These days were wonderful fun, and Rossby's weather system worked. It became the model for use by fast-spreading U.S. airlines. When not too busy, Rossby kept up with the hard-boiled pilots in jazz-age drinking and other festivities. Most of them envied his way with women. "It was his Swedish manners," says one of his friends of those days. "He'd hold the hand of a nightclub hat-check girl for several minutes, ladling out those Swedish compliments. If it was any other guy, the girl would have called the manager...
...Rossby was invited by Massachusetts Institute of Technology to head its department of meteorology. He left Byers in charge of the weather-reporting system and said goodbye to California and its convivial pilots. "A problem solved," Rossby often remarks, "is a dead problem." In Cambridge fresh problems were waiting...
...date 1939, however, has another significance: it was the start of World War II, during which meteorology suddenly came of age. It was quickly apparent that the war would be fought largely in the air. with weather often the controlling factor. Storms would put whole air forces out of action. For surface forces, clouds and fogs would be all-important shelter...
Rossby did a part-time hitch as head of research with the Weather Bureau, which had a new chief and was trying hard to bring itself up to date. But in 1941, with the war spreading fast, the University of Chicago asked him to head its new department of meteorology. He accepted partly because one of his basic beliefs is that after about ten years a group of associates have nothing new to tell each other. They should break it up. he thinks, and look for fresh stimulation...
...students got a crash-grounding in the sort of meteorology that would be most useful in war. They learned how to predict whether the sky over a German city would be clear enough at a certain hour for high-altitude, visual bombing. Similar methods predicted days when dirty weather would protect ground troops from enemy...