Joseph Smagorinsky (1924–2005)

Basic Facts

Full name: Joseph Smagorinsky
Born: 29 January 1924, New York City, New York, USA
Died: 21 September 2005 (age 81), Hillsborough, New Jersey, USA
Spouse: Margaret Frances Elizabeth Knoepfel (married 29 May 1948; d. 14 November 2011)
Children: Anne, Peter, Teresa, Julia, Frederick

Family Background

Parents Nathan Smagorinsky and Dina Azaroff emigrated from Gomel, Belarus, fleeing early-20th-century pogroms. Nathan arrived in 1913 via the coast of Finland, passed through Ellis Island, and settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He worked first as a house painter, then established a paint store that grew into a hardware business. Joseph had four siblings: Jacob (died in infancy), Samuel (b. 1903), David (b. 1907), and Hillel/Harry (b. 1919).

Education

Year	Degree / Institution	Notes
–	Stuyvesant High School for Math and Science, Manhattan
1947	B.S., New York University	Interrupted by WWII service
1948	M.S., New York University
1953	Ph.D., New York University	Advisor: Bernhard Haurwitz

During WWII he joined the U.S. Air Force mid-sophomore year. He trained in mathematics and physics at Brown University, then in dynamical meteorology at MIT (under Ed Lorenz). He flew as a weather observer in the nose of a bomber.

Career

1950: Participated in the landmark ENIAC computation at Aberdeen, Maryland, with Jule Charney, Ragnar Fjortoft, John Freeman, and George Platzman – the first successful numerical weather forecast.
1953: Joined the U.S. Weather Bureau; participated in the Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit (JNWPU).
1955: At von Neumann’s instigation, the Weather Bureau created the General Circulation Research Section under Smagorinsky’s direction (age 31; he was 29 when he joined the Weather Bureau in 1953).
1959: Section renamed the General Circulation Research Laboratory.
1963: Renamed again as the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL).
1968: GFDL relocated to Princeton University campus.
1968–1983: Visiting lecturer/professor in geological and geophysical sciences, Princeton.
1983: Retired as GFDL director after 28 years of leadership.
1983–1998: Visiting senior fellow in atmospheric and oceanic sciences, Princeton.

Major Scientific Contributions

ENIAC Forecast (1950)

Smagorinsky was part of the team led by Jule Charney that ran the first successful computer weather forecasts on the ENIAC in April 1950. This demonstrated the feasibility of numerical weather prediction.

Primitive-Equation General Circulation Model (1963)

Published the seminal paper “General Circulation Experiments with the Primitive Equations: I. The Basic Experiment” in the Monthly Weather Review. This was a nine-level hemispheric GCM and fundamentally advanced atmospheric modeling from quasi-geostrophic to primitive-equation frameworks.

Smagorinsky Model for Subgrid-Scale Turbulence

In the same 1963 paper, Smagorinsky introduced a first-order subgrid-scale closure for turbulence – now known as the Smagorinsky model (or Smagorinsky–Lilly model, developed further with Douglas Lilly and James Deardorff). The eddy viscosity is expressed as the characteristic grid scale multiplied by a velocity scale. This model remains the most widely used approach in large eddy simulation (LES) and is applied across fluid dynamics far beyond meteorology.

Building GFDL

Smagorinsky’s greatest institutional achievement was building GFDL into the world’s premier climate modeling laboratory. He recruited Syukuro Manabe (1959) and Kirk Bryan (1961), who together produced the first coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model in 1969. Other key recruits included Isidoro Orlanski, Jerry Mahlman, Yoshio Kurihara, Kikuro Miyakoda, and Isaac Held.

He recognized early that increasing computer power would enable climate simulation (long-term weather statistics) rather than just short-term weather prediction.

Personality and Anecdotes

Jerry Mahlman described Smagorinsky’s “almost relentless pursuit of excellence” and his rejection of publication-counting academic culture in favor of solving significant scientific problems.
Smagorinsky exhibited an “authoritarian style of rule tempered by protection of the scientists from disrupting outside influence” while celebrating the elitism and esprit de corps that characterized GFDL (BAMS 2008).
He brought Japanese scientists (Manabe, Kurihara, Miyakoda) to GFDL shortly after WWII despite lingering xenophobic attitudes, valuing scientific merit over nationalism.
He repeatedly secured the world’s fastest computers for GFDL through what colleagues described as unexplained influence in competitive resource allocation. GFDL used the IBM Stretch (world’s fastest 1961–1964) and the CDC 6600 (world’s fastest 1964–1969).
His wife Margaret (nee Knoepfel) was the first female statistician hired by the Weather Bureau. She was one of the computer operators for the 1950 ENIAC forecast experiment, though her name was absent from the journal article.
As a boy in Depression-era New York, he would visit the top of the New York Daily News building to look at the weather instruments.
During WWII he flew in the nose of bombers as a weather observer, making forecasts based on wave size, air temperature, and wind velocity. He provided flight forecasts for B-29 squadrons in Nebraska and served as a weather reconnaissance officer in the North Atlantic.

Key Quotes

On Norman Phillips’s 1956 general circulation experiment, Smagorinsky wrote that it demonstrated a new era had been opened in climate modeling (from his 1983 retrospective “The Beginnings of Numerical Weather Prediction and General Circulation Modeling: Early Recollections,” Advances in Geophysics 25: 3–37).

Awards and Honors

Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award (1967)
Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal (1972) – AMS highest honor
Buys Ballot Gold Medal (1974)
International Meteorological Organization Prize and Gold Medal (1974)
Symons Memorial Gold Medal, Royal Meteorological Society (1980)
Cleveland Abbe Award (1980)
Presidential Award (1980)
Department of Commerce Gold Medal
President of the American Meteorological Society (1986)
International Meteorological Organization Prize (1988)
Honorary doctorate, University of Munich
Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth Science (2003, shared with Norman A. Phillips)
NOAA recognized him as one of the ten most significant figures in the agency’s history
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Connections to Other Scientists

Jule Charney: Invited Smagorinsky to Princeton for his doctoral research; led the ENIAC forecast team together.
John von Neumann: Instigated creation of the General Circulation Research Section that Smagorinsky would lead.
Syukuro Manabe: Recruited to GFDL in 1959; became one of the most important climate modelers in history.
Kirk Bryan: Recruited to GFDL in 1961; co-developed the first coupled ocean-atmosphere model with Manabe.
Norman Phillips: Shared the 2003 Benjamin Franklin Medal; Phillips’s 1956 GCM experiment inspired Smagorinsky’s own work.
Ed Lorenz: Taught Smagorinsky dynamical meteorology at MIT during WWII military training.

Key Publications

Smagorinsky, J. (1963). “General Circulation Experiments with the Primitive Equations: I. The Basic Experiment.” Monthly Weather Review, 91(3), 99–164.
Manabe, S., Smagorinsky, J., & Strickler, R. F. (1965). “Simulated Climatology of a General Circulation Model with a Hydrologic Cycle.” Monthly Weather Review, 93(12), 769–798.
Smagorinsky, J. (1983). “The Beginnings of Numerical Weather Prediction and General Circulation Modeling: Early Recollections.” Advances in Geophysics, 25, 3–37.

Sources

Accessed: 2026-04-02

Michał Brennek