He specialized in the study of fog, running a weather research station on Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy for over 60 years.
[4] Cunningham attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1938 to 1942 and worked on an aircraft icing research team in the university's meteorology department during World War Two.
His findings helped to establish that the "bright band" observed on radar displays was an artifact of melting snowflakes.
[6] After retiring in 1979 Cunningham spent several years with the World Meteorological Organization as field director of an international research project on precipitation enhancement.
[7] Cunningham contributed his analysis of decades of daily fog samples from Kent Island to research published in the 1980s on the effect of acid rain on forests.