meteorologist, was born in Portland, Oregon, to Edwin Washington, a railroad porter, and Dorothy Morton, a homemaker. He became interested in science in high school, but his interests shifted during his senior year from chemistry to physics, which he majored in at Oregon State University in Corvallis. His interest in meteorology stemmed from a job he held as an undergraduate at a weather radar installation near Corvallis that tracked storms from the Pacific Ocean as they hit the Oregon coast. After receiving a BS in Physics in 1958 and an MS in Meteorology in 1960, he entered the graduate program at Pennsylvania State University, receiving a PhD in Meteorology in 1964. That same year, he accepted a full-time position as a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, where he had worked the previous summer.
As a graduate student ...
