[1] Born on November 29, 1867, in Boston, Massachusetts,[2] the son of Henry Veazey Ward and Anna Saltonstall (Merrill), he matriculated to Harvard University in 1885, where he received an A.B.

[4] In 1913, he urged that the principles of eugenics be applied to immigrants, thereby denying entry to undesirable aliens on the basis of their physical, mental, or economic qualities.

[2] In 1903, Ward released a translated and updated version of Austrian meteorologist Julius von Hann's Handbuch der Klimatologie (1883), which became widely used.

He spent part of 1910 in São Paulo, Brazil, studying the economic climatology of the region's coffee district.

[11] During 1929, Professor Ward made a tour of the world, stopping in locations such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Manila to perform scientific studies.

[12] Ward was perhaps the first person to emphasize the understanding of climate as a dynamic concept, rather than the static view held in the past.