AMS Newsletter Volume 18, Number 6, June 1997
Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first and only woman ever to be elected president of AMS, in 1989, and Chief Scientist for Meteorology at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, has gained new recognition. She has had NASA's fastest supercomputer, the CRAY T3E, named for her. Simpson was chosen for the honor for her pioneering work using computers in meteorological research.
During presentation ceremonies at Goddard on 14 May, Simpson said, "It is a great honor to have such a remarkable supercomputer named after me." The NASA meteorologist was a pioneer in cloud modeling, producing the first one-dimensional model and the first cumulus model on a computer. She also led research into multicloud modeling. Her credits include more than 170 publications in the areas of tropical meteorology, tropical cloud systems and modeling, tropical storms, and tropical rain measurement from space.