Namias helped to develop the system of passenger flight weather forecasting, and researched the interaction between the oceans and atmosphere.

He was offered a four-year scholarship to Wesleyan University, but due to the looming recession and his father's ill health, Jerome elected to remain home at that time.

While working at the National Weather Service in Washington D.C., Namias entered into correspondence with the head of the newly established meteorology department at MIT, Carl-Gustaf Rossby.

However, in 1934 he left MIT to work in the nascent forecasting bureau of Trans-World Airlines in Newark and then in Kansas City, where he stayed until 1934.

That job was canceled in 1934 when TWA lost a government airmail contract, and Namias "was happy to return to part-time work at MIT and Blue Hill Observatory, even though he had to learn to live on student pay once again.

"[3] In 1934 Namias had determined to obtain a college degree, and had enrolled in the University of Minnesota, which had lower tuition than MIT.

Namias was hired after a face-to-face interview which included an exercise in extracting predictions from meteorological data, and he was sent to the weather bureau in Washington, D.C.

In the NWS library, Namias discovered the scientific reports issued by Carl G. Rossby's new department of meteorology at MIT.

He arranged a job for Namias, taking and analyzing data from the research aircraft instruments used by the department at the East Boston Airport.

Sometimes, Namias's work entailed fourteen-hour days, which included tracking balloon runs with the help of a theodolite to determine wind directions and speeds at various altitudes.

In 1934 Rossby suggested that Namias take a job in the rapidly expanding airline industry, with its desire to establish meteorological departments.

At Rossby's suggestion, Namias constructed a trial upper-level map by judicial extrapolations, estimating quantitatively the flow patterns aloft over the North Atlantic, as well as the United States.

The group's work caught the attention of the US military as World War II began unfolding, and in 1941 Namias was asked to take a one-year leave of absence from MIT to head the forecasting effort in Washington, D.C.

Dr Rossby returned to Sweden after the war to found the International Institute of Meteorology, and invited Namias to Stockholm.

In 1955 Namias also received the Rockefeller Public Service Award, which made it possible for him to spend a year studying at his choice of locale.

Namias was invited to speak at the 1957 Rancho Santa Fe CalCOFI (California Cooperative Fisheries) conference of Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

In 1981 Namias received the Sverdrup Gold Medal of the American Meteorological Society for his pioneering efforts on air-sea interactions.

He was survived by his wife, daughter and grandchildren when he died in La Jolla, California, due to complications of a stroke which left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak or write (1989), and of pneumonia (1997).