Jule Gregory Charney (January 1, 1917 – June 16, 1981) was an American meteorologist who played an important role in developing numerical weather prediction and increasing understanding of the general circulation of the atmosphere by devising a series of increasingly sophisticated mathematical models of the atmosphere. His work was the driving force behind many national and international weather initiatives and programs. Considered the father of modern dynamical meteorology, Charney is credited with having "guided the postwar evolution of modern meteorology more than any other living figure." Charney's work also influenced that of his close colleague Edward Lorenz, who explored the limitations of predictability and was a pioneer of the field of chaos theory. Biography Charney was born in San Francisco, California, on January 1, 1917, to Russian immigrants Ely Charney and Stella Littman, tailors in the garment industry. Charney spent most of his early life in California. After a 20-month battle with cancer, he died in Boston at the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute at the age of 64. Education Charney earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at UCLA, culminating in a Ph.D. in physics in 1946. His Ph.D. dissertation, titled “The Dynamics of Long Waves in a Baroclinic Westerly Current” comprised the entire October 1947 issue of the Journal of Meteorology. The paper was influential because it emphasized the influence of “long waves” in the upper atmosphere on the behavior of the entire atmosphere rather than the more traditional emphasis on the polar front and also provided a way of analyzing perturbations along these waves that was both physically insightful and mathematically rigorous. Career and legacy Charney began his career at his alma mater, UCLA, as an instructor in physics and meteorology from 1941 to 1946. In 1946, Charney became a research associate at the University of Chicago under Carl-Gustav Rossby, a Swedish-born American meteorologist whose theories of large-scale air movements helped revolutionize meteorology. From 1947 to 1948, Charney held a National Research Council postgraduate fellowship at the University of Oslo in Norway. During this year, he developed a technique known as the “quasi-geostrophic approximation” for calculating the large-scale motions of planetary-scale waves. Charney's quasi-geostrophic vorticity equations allowed for concise mathematical description of large-scale atmospheric and oceanic circulations, enabling future numerical weather prediction work. Numerical weather prediction In 1948, Charney joined the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, to explore the feasibility of applying digital computers to