February 14, 2008
Atmospheric Sciences scholarship to be named for Richard Reed
Richard Reed, a longtime University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor, died Feb. 4 in Seattle. He was 85.
Reed, who joined the UW faculty in 1954, was a highly regarded researcher but also helped guide the careers of current UW faculty members and fostered educational opportunities for students. He and his wife, Joan, had anonymously endowed a scholarship for undergraduates that now will be called the Richard J. and Joan M. Reed Endowed Atmospheric Sciences Scholarship.
Reed was born in Braintree, Mass., and served in the Navy during World War II. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology and received a doctorate in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949.
During his early career at the UW, he discovered a phenomenon called the quasi-biennial oscillation in which the wind in the tropical stratosphere alternates between easterly and westerly about every 28 months, gradually moving lower in the stratosphere during that time. The oscillation has been found to influence monsoon precipitation in the tropics and stratospheric circulation during winter in the northern hemisphere.
His consulting for government agencies included NASA, the National Science Foundation and Washington state, including an analysis of factors that led to the sinking of the Hood Canal Bridge during a 1979 storm. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, which in 1972 presented Reed with its Second Half Century Award.
The meteorological society in 2002 held a symposium named for him, noting in the program that he was being honored not just for his influential research “but also for his leadership in the national and international science community, his teaching and advising of three generations of graduate students, and the inspiration he has provided to these students and others over the course of the last half of the 20th century.”
Contributions to the scholarship fund may be made by sending checks made out to the fund to the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Box 351640, or by visiting a secure Web link.
