Joseph Smagorinsky (29 January 1924 – 21 September 2005) was an American meteorologist and the first director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL).

In 1913, Nathan emigrated from the coast of Finland, passing through Ellis Island and settling on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

In 1916, with the business established, Dina, Sam, and David emigrated by going to Murmansk and then southward along the Norwegian coast to Christiana (now Oslo) and boarding a boat to New York where they joined Nathan.

[2] In the middle of his sophomore year at NYU, he entered the Air Force and joined an elite group of cadet recruits, chosen for their talents in mathematics and physics.

As a doctoral student, while serving the remainder of his army commitment, he attended a lecture on weather forecasting conducted by Jule Charney, and asked a series of pointed questions during the question-and-answer session following the talk.

His wife Margaret Smagorinsky (née Knoepfel) was also a member of the team that programmed the ENIAC computer,[4] and was the first woman statistician hired by the Weather Bureau.

An exceptional mathematician, von Neumann was among the first to see the potential afforded by computers for much faster processing of data and thus more responsive weather forecasting.

At the Institute for Advanced Study, he used his mathematical knowledge and Smagorinsky worked with Charney to develop a new approach called numerical weather prediction.

The data were then fed into computers and subjected to the laws of physics, enabling forecasts of how turbulence, water, heat, and other factors interacted to produce weather patterns.

In his doctoral dissertation, conducted at NYU under the direction of Bernhard Haurwitz, Smagorinsky developed a new theory for how heat sources and sinks in mid-latitudes, created by the thermal contrast between land and oceans, disturbed the path of the jet stream.

In 1955–56, Smagorinsky collaborated with John von Neumann, Jule Charney, and Norman Phillips to develop a 2-level, zonal hemispheric model using a subset of the primitive equations.

Other researchers who worked with Smagorinsky in Washington and Princeton included Isidoro Orlanski, Jerry Mahlman, Syukuro Manabe, Yoshio Kurihara, Kikuro Miyakoda, Rod Graham, Leith Holloway, Isaac Held, Garreth Williams, George Philander, and Douglas Lilly.

Development of this first climate model was based on Smagorinsky's belief that individual inquiry would be inadequate for addressing such a complex problem.

He realized that it would take large-scale numerical modeling with teams of scientists using commonly shared high-speed computers to achieve such a breakthrough.

Very early in his career, he brought pioneering oceanographer Kirk Bryan to GFDL to account for oceanic influences on the weather; and shortly following World War II, with the nation still leery of Japan, he invited Suki Manabe, Yoshio Kurihara, and Kikuro Miyakoda to GFDL, valuing their scientific expertise and potential and ignoring the xenophobia that might have discouraged such international collaboration.

He continued this practice of inviting scientists to GFDL who could take on the project of producing a comprehensive theory of atmospheric processes, valuing talent and creativity over what he regarded as irrelevant factors such as field or nationality.

He wanted junior scientists such as us to focus on solving difficult scientific challenges of major relevance to NOAA, the United States, and the world.

Smagorinsky was among the earliest researchers who sought to exploit new methods of numerical weather prediction (NWP) to extend forecasting past one or two days.

He extended early weather models to include variables such as wind, cloud cover, precipitation, atmospheric pressure and radiation emanating from the earth and sun.

With colleagues Douglas Lilly and James Deardorff, both at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), he developed one of the first successful approaches to large eddy simulation (e.g., the Smagorinsky-Lilly model), providing a solution to this problem that is still in use, not only in meteorology, but in all fields involving fluid dynamics.

Scientists at the laboratory also developed the first coupled atmosphere-ocean climate models for studies of global warming, emphasizing the important differences between the "equilibrium" and "transient" responses to increasing carbon dioxide.

Tony Hollingsworth of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) made the point in his remarks at the Princeton lecture after Smagorinsky was presented with the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth Science that Smagorinsky's work resulted in saving millions of lives around the world in that severe weather predictions such as hurricanes could alert whole towns to be saved.

[citation needed] The year GFDL moved to Princeton, Smagorinsky was named a visiting lecturer with the rank of professor in geological and geophysical sciences at the university.

Following their marriage, Margaret chose to stay at home and raise their five children, Anne, Peter, Teresa, Julia, and Frederick.