Eugenia Kalnay

Over the past three decades Eugenia Kalnay has been the leading contributor to the theory and practice of numerical weather prediction. A member of the NAE, Foreign Member of Academia Europeae and Argentine Academy of Physical Sciences, and winner of the International Meteorological Organization (IMO) Prize, she brought US weather prediction up to world-class standards. She developed data assimilation approaches and a breeding method that led to improvements in the weather forecast models and extension of useful weather forecast to 10 days. She spearheaded a reanalysis of 60 years of weather observations, and produced a self-consistent 4-D dataset of the atmospheric circulation. The reanalysis is certainly the most scientifically fertile dataset in climate science since its creation (and perhaps for all time). Its analysis has revealed modes of climate variability from intraseasonal, interannual and decadal time scales, as well as insights into their dynamics, and has enabled climate forecasts on longer time scales. Prof. Kalnay was the first woman to receive a PhD in Meteorology from MIT and the first to hold a faculty position there.~