She was offered a job at the Railroad Retirement Board in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a statistician processing paperwork for employees looking to enter the civil service.
[3] Smagorinsky had five children: Anne, Peter, Teresa, Julia, and Frederick, and left full-time government employment after her first child was born in 1951.
[citation needed] Smagorinsky, in supporting her husband's work, processed data and programmed the ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.
[7] In April 1950, a group of meteorologists at New Jersey's Institute for Advanced Study successfully produced the first weather forecast using the ENIAC and numerical prediction techniques.
[8][9] Smagorinsky is cited as a programmer of computers for 5-day weather forecast models created by the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.