Dr. William Smith
Distinguished Professor
Dr. Smith is a Distinguished Professor of the Department of Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Hampton University, Hampton Virginia and Professor Emeritus of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Professor Smith was the Principal Investigator of several satellite programs for NOAA (1966-1984), Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1984-1997) where he also directed the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) and subsequently the positions of Chief, Atmospheric Sciences Division, and Senior Scientist at the NASA’s Langley Research Center (1997-2004). Dr. Smith is an active satellite and airborne experimentalist. Most notably, Dr. Smith pioneered the hyper-spectral resolution sounding technique that is being used for current and future polar satellite advanced infrared sounding systems (e.g., the Aqua/AIRS, MetOp/IASI, and NPP/NPOESS CrIS). Dr. Smith has published more than 150 papers in the scientific literature and has contributed to books used for scientific research and teaching. Dr. Smith has received numerous awards for his research accomplishments in the field of atmospheric science.
Publications:
- Smith, W. L., H. M. Woolf and W. J. Jacob, 1970: A regression method for obtaining real time temperature and geopotential height profiles from satellite spectrometer measurements and its application to Nimbus-III 'SIRS' observations. Mon. Wea. Rev., 98, 582-603.
- Smith, W. L., H. M. Woolf and H. E. Fleming, 1972: Retrieval of atmospheric temperature profiles from satellite measurements for dynamical forecasting. J. Appl. Meteor., 11, 113-122.
- Smith, W. L. and H. M. Woolf 1976: The use of eigenvectors of statistical co-variance matrices for interpreting satellite sounding radiometer observations. J. Atmos. Sci., 33, 1127-1140.
- Smith, W. L., V. E. Suomi, W. P. Menzel, H. M. Woolf, L. A. Sromovsky, H. E. Revercomb, C. M. Hayden, D. N. Erickson, and F. R. Mosher, 1981: First sounding results from VAS-D. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 62, 232-236.
- Smith, W. L., 1983: The retrieval of atmospheric profiles from VAS geostationary radiance observations. J. Atmos. Sci., 40, 2025-2035.
