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.

Yale Mintz (1916–1991)

Basic Facts

  • Full name: Yale Mintz
  • Born: 30 March 1916, Manhattan, New York, NY, USA
  • Died: 27 April 1991, Jerusalem, Israel (age 75), following several months of a “brave fight against cancer”
  • Spouse: Ruth Mintz (described in the UCLA In Memoriam as “cultured and talented”; the couple was known for their hospitality to new department members)
  • Nationality: American
  • Affiliation at death: Professor Emeritus, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, UCLA; consulting scientist, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Education

Year Degree / Institution
1937 B.A., general humanistic studies, Dartmouth College
1942 M.S., geology, Columbia University
1949 Ph.D., meteorology, UCLA (second Ph.D. ever awarded by the UCLA
Department of Meteorology; advisor Jacob Bjerknes)  

Mintz came to meteorology late and by a roundabout path: a humanistic undergraduate degree at Dartmouth, a geology M.S. at Columbia during the Second World War years, and only then a switch into meteorology at the brand-new UCLA Department of Meteorology that Jacob Bjerknes had founded in

  1. His was the second doctorate the department ever granted.

Career

  • 1949–1950: Associate project director (under Bjerknes) on the UCLA General Circulation Project, a descriptive-climatology effort using the SWAC computer (Standards Western Automatic Computer), one of the earliest machines on the UCLA campus.
  • 1950: Joined the UCLA Department of Meteorology faculty.
  • early 1950s: Co-principal investigator with J. Bjerknes on the UCLA General Circulation Project. According to the UCLA In Memoriam (1993), “some of us still remember the heroic efforts of Mintz in the earlier phase of this project during which he orchestrated an army of student helpers and amateur programmers to feed a prodigious amount of data through paper tape to SWAC, the earliest computer on campus.”
  • late 1950s: Inspired by the 1956 Phillips experiment at Princeton, Mintz began to design numerical general-circulation experiments at UCLA, over the skepticism of senior departmental colleagues who “felt that it was far too ambitious a project for a single faculty member to undertake.”
  • 1961: Recruited Akio Arakawa from the Japan Meteorological Agency.
  • 1961–1963: Co-developed the first Mintz–Arakawa two-level global primitive-equation GCM with realistic topography. Published the first results himself; Arakawa did all the programming.
  • 1967–1969: Chair, UCLA Department of Meteorology.
  • mid-1970s onward: Took sabbaticals in Israel; began collaborations at the Hebrew University and the Weizmann Institute.
  • 1977: Retired from UCLA (emeritus). Joined NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center as a consulting scientist, working under Milton Halem. His late work focused on the influence of land- and ocean-surface processes on the distribution of precipitation.
  • 1980s: Continued research at Goddard; frequent visits back to UCLA.
  • 1991: Died in Jerusalem.

Major Scientific Contributions

Angular momentum and the mean meridional circulation (1950s)

Mintz’s Ph.D. thesis under Bjerknes dealt with the general circulation of the atmosphere; his early publications in the 1950s, often with Gordon Dean and Shih-Kung Kao, were foundational descriptive analyses of:

  • Eddy angular-momentum transport in the atmosphere, showing how midlatitude eddies transfer angular momentum poleward, maintaining the zonal jet streams against surface friction. These results “were to become standard textbook material” (UCLA In Memoriam, 1993).
  • The zonally averaged general circulation, including the first good observational picture of the mean meridional circulation (the three-cell structure: Hadley, Ferrel, polar).
  • A climatological atlas (with Gordon Dean) summarizing the observed state of the global circulation for use as a benchmark for theoretical and numerical studies.

These contributions established Mintz as an observationally rigorous climatologist well before the GCM era. The UCLA In Memoriam describes his descriptions of “the field of mean motion, the zonally averaged state, and poleward angular momentum flux” as “classic contributions to meteorology.” (Johnson and Arakawa wrote a full technical review of them in 1996 – see Sources.)

Founding the UCLA General Circulation Modelling Programme (1961–1977)

This is what Mintz is remembered for. Inspired by Norman Phillips’s 1956 two-level experiment at the Institute for Advanced Study, Mintz recognized in the late 1950s that numerical modelling – not purely diagnostic climatology – was the future of the field. He conceived the UCLA atmospheric general circulation model as a global, primitive-equation model with realistic land–sea distribution and surface topography – the first of that kind ever developed. Both GFDL’s Smagorinsky/Manabe model and NCAR’s Kasahara–Washington effort were initially hemispheric; Mintz insisted on a global domain from the outset.

To realize this ambition, in 1961 Mintz recruited Akio Arakawa from the Japan Meteorological Agency, on the strong recommendation of University of Tokyo meteorology professors. Mintz never learned to programme; he provided the physical intuition, the scientific vision, the funding, and the political will. Arakawa did all the mathematics and all the coding.

As Arakawa wrote in the 1996 Johnson–Arakawa tribute, and confirmed in his 1997 AIP oral history: Mintz was “not really a theoretician… He was very broad, so I learned a lot from him and broadened myself. But he also trusted me about the judgment, especially when dynamics was involved… He has very good insight, and he has new ideas every day. At first he wanted to check that idea with me, and I usually would object to more than half of his ideas, but the rest were very good ideas.”

Mintz pioneered several early applications of the model:

  • Martian general circulation (with Conway Leovy, mid-1960s): the Mintz–Leovy Mars GCM was the first attempt to apply a terrestrial GCM to another planet’s atmosphere. It preceded Mariner 9’s 1971 arrival at Mars.
  • Three-dimensional stratospheric ozone transport (with Michael Schlesinger), one of the first GCM-based attempts to simulate the global ozone distribution.
  • Coupled ocean–atmosphere modelling, which Mintz was pushing at UCLA “as early as in the late 1960s” – decades before coupled models became standard (UCLA In Memoriam, 1993).

Land–surface and hydrological modelling (NASA Goddard, 1977–1991)

After retirement from UCLA, Mintz’s Goddard work focused on how soil moisture, vegetation, and evaporation feedbacks affect the simulated climate. This was pioneering territory: the first generations of GCMs treated the land surface as a thermal bucket with prescribed albedo. Mintz and collaborators were among the first to show that realistic soil-moisture physics matters enormously for simulated precipitation patterns.

Personality and Working Style

The UCLA In Memoriam (written by Arakawa, S. V. Venkateswaran, and Morton G. Wurtele, 1993) gives the clearest portrait:

“Mintz belonged to that vanished breed of scientists who cultivated scholarship for its own sake and wished to be regarded as a naturalist. He was a perfectionist who brought, to every piece of research that he did, a well-developed sense of aesthetics. He did most of his work in collaboration with others and he always brought a passionate dedication and an infectious sense of enthusiasm to his team. He never hesitated to make his scientific opinions known to his peers vocally. He struggled for clarity in his scientific writings, and his high standards kept the number of his publications to a modest list.”

“Yale Mintz was religious by temperament, liberal and international in outlook, and an academic by choice.”

Arakawa’s 1997 oral history characterized Mintz as “a very outgoing, aggressive person… very active in many, many ways,” noting that Mintz was the one “responsible for getting money; I didn’t care!” Mintz was the administrator, the grant-writer, the visionary, and the political operator within the department – the one who could arrange weekend computer access on the UCLA Business School’s IBM 709 for the fledgling GCM.

Mintz and Arakawa never co-authored a single paper. (Mintz was the sole author of the early reports describing the model’s results; Arakawa wrote the technical/numerical papers separately.) But they “spent an hour or so every day” discussing science for two decades (Arakawa, 1997 AIP oral history).

Credit and Naming

Although the running partnership was always called “Mintz–Arakawa” when Mintz was alive, Mintz himself cared deeply about proper attribution. He is the one who named the key innovation “Arakawa’s Jacobian” – insisting on giving Arakawa sole credit for the energy- and enstrophy-conserving finite-difference scheme even though it was the central mathematical engine of their model. This care about credit was one of the traits Arakawa most emphasized in his tributes.

Awards and Honours

  • Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award, American Meteorological Society (1967) – one of five co-recipients, “for their outstanding individual and collective contributions to dynamic meteorology through their pioneering efforts to numerically model the dynamic behavior of the atmosphere by utilizing directly the primitive equations of motion.”
  • Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, AMS (1990) – the Society’s highest honour, “for preeminent leadership in the global modeling of climate, and for inspiring tutelage of several generations of scientists.”

Note: the existing Jekyll-repo research had mis-dated this as “1970” – it is 1990, one year before his death.

Students and Scientific Heirs

Mintz mentored or collaborated closely with an extraordinary roster of scientists who went on to drive climate modelling for the rest of the century:

  • Conway B. Leovy (Martian atmospheres; later at Univ. of Washington)
  • Michael E. Schlesinger (stratospheric ozone; later at Oregon State and Illinois; a major figure in climate sensitivity studies)
  • W. Lawrence Gates (UCLA Ph.D.; carried the Mintz–Arakawa model to RAND and then to Oregon State in the 1970s; later became founding head of the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, PCMDI, at Lawrence Livermore)
  • Gordon Dean (climatological atlas, 1950s)
  • Shih-Kung Kao (atmospheric angular momentum, 1950s)
  • Akio Arakawa (collaborator and colleague rather than formal student, but Mintz recruited him to UCLA)

Many of Arakawa’s later students (Wayne Schubert, David Randall, Max Suarez, Pierre Morel, Michael Schlesinger, Young-Joon Kim, Joao Teixeira, Steve Krueger) also overlapped with Mintz.

Connections to Other Scientists

  • Jacob Bjerknes: Mintz’s Ph.D. advisor; founder and first chair of the UCLA Meteorology Department (1940). Bjerknes had been a foundational figure in mid-latitude cyclone theory; Mintz joined his descriptive general-circulation project and never left the topic.
  • Akio Arakawa: the partnership (1961–1991) that produced the UCLA GCM.
  • Norman Phillips: Phillips’s 1956 two-level experiment was the trigger that convinced Mintz to move from climatology to modelling.
  • Joseph Smagorinsky: parallel GCM development at GFDL; the three first-generation GCM programmes (UCLA, GFDL, NCAR) were in friendly competition.
  • Syukuro Manabe: GFDL colleague, parallel Japanese-born GCM pioneer.
  • James Hansen and Milton Halem: both at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York; Hansen’s GISS model was a direct descendant of the UCLA model, and Milton Halem was Mintz’s host after retirement at Goddard Space Flight Center.
  • Conway Leovy: collaborator on the Mars GCM; a UCLA Mintz student.
  • Michael Schlesinger: collaborator on 3-D ozone transport; a UCLA student.

Unlike Arakawa, Mintz was not a member of the 1979 Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate (the Charney Report). That panel was Arakawa, D. James Baker, Bert Bolin, Robert E. Dickinson, Richard Goody, Cecil Leith, Henry Stommel, and Carl Wunsch, chaired by Jule Charney; Manabe and Hansen briefed the panel as outside experts.

Key Publications

(Mintz’s publication list is short by design; he was, as Arakawa put it, “lazy in writing” during the formative years of the UCLA GCM, and a perfectionist who delayed anything he did not think fully clear.)

  • Mintz, Y. (1951). “The geostrophic poleward flux of angular momentum in the month of January 1949.” Tellus 3, 195–200.
  • Mintz, Y. (1954). “The observed zonal circulation of the atmosphere.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 35(5), 208–214.
  • Mintz, Y. (1958). “Design of some numerical general circulation experiments.” Bulletin of the Research Council of Israel 76, 67–114. (The blueprint for the Mintz–Arakawa project. Cited by Paul Edwards as reference [1] for the UCLA chapter in A Vast Machine.)
  • Mintz, Y., and Y. Serafini (1981). “Global fields of monthly normal soil moisture as derived from observed precipitation and an estimated potential evapotranspiration.” (Goddard-era land-surface work.)
  • Shukla, J., and Y. Mintz (1982). “Influence of land-surface evapotranspiration on the Earth’s climate.” Science 215, 1498–1501. A landmark showing that land-surface evaporation matters for global climate.
  • Langlois, W. E., and H. C. W. Kwok (1969). “Numerical Experiments with the Mintz–Arakawa General Circulation Model, Part 1: Description of the Model.” IBM Research Report RJ-501. (Written by IBM San Jose scientists who documented the model under Mintz’s authorization.)

Anecdotes

  • SWAC and paper tape: In the early 1950s Mintz “orchestrated an army of student helpers and amateur programmers to feed a prodigious amount of data through paper tape to SWAC” – the Standards Western Automatic Computer, “the earliest computer on campus, now languishing in the basement of the Engineering Building” (UCLA In Memoriam, 1993).
  • No programming, ever: In two decades of building GCMs, Mintz never wrote a line of code. He was the visionary; Arakawa was the engineer. Yet Mintz “sometimes… using his intuitive understanding of air flow [would] suggest where an error lurked” in Arakawa’s code (Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming).
  • Writing letters to Japan: When Arakawa returned to Japan in 1963 to satisfy his J-visa residency requirement, Mintz wrote him “every month” for two years to convince him to return to UCLA permanently – which he did, in 1965 (Arakawa, AIP oral history 1997).
  • The department hospitality: “He and his cultured and talented wife, Ruth Mintz, were an extremely friendly couple and their thoughtful hospitality, especially to the new members of the department, will be remembered with gratitude” (UCLA In Memoriam, 1993).
  • Israeli connection: From the mid-1970s Mintz took sabbaticals in Israel for at least one quarter every year; he eventually moved to Jerusalem in retirement and died there in April 1991. His religious temperament and international outlook were, in Arakawa’s words, a lifelong part of who he was.

Sources

Accessed: 2026-04-19