Edward S. Epstein

Born April 29, 1931, Edward S. Epstein is one of the world's leading experts on statistical meteorology and climatology. His research career began in the mid-1950s when he worked at the Air Force Cambridge Research Center, Arizona State University, and The Pennsylvania State University.  His first published paper appeared in the Journal of Meteorology in 1956 on "A New Method for Determining the Vertical Distribution of Ozone from a Ground Station." This was followed by two papers in 1959 on power spectrum analysis of ozone and on vertical velocities in the lower stratosphere.

During the decade of the 1960s, Dr. Epstein was at the University of Michigan, first as a professor of meteorology and later as department chairman. While there, he published many papers on probability forecasting, quality control, and forecast utility. Some of these were written jointly with Allan Murphy, an important scientific collaboration.

In the 1968/69 academic year, Dr. Epstein was a visiting scientist at the University of Stockholm. While in Stockholm, he developed the ranked probability score that is now widely used in forecast verification. Here he also wrote his famous paper on stochastic-dynamic prediction published in Tellus at the end of 1969. This topic was developed further when he returned to the University of Michigan and published several papers with two of his (now well known) students, Rex Fleming and Eric Pitcher.

Dr. Epstein and his family moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Washington, D.C. in 1973 when he took a high level executive position in the U.S. Department of Commerce as an associate administrator of NOAA. In 1978 he became the director of NOAA's National Climate Program Office, and in 1981 he was named the chief of NOAA's Climate and Earth Sciences Laboratory.

Dr. Epstein's research career was rejuvenated in 1983 when he was appointed as the chief Scientist of the Climate Analysis Center of the U.S. National Weather Service's National Meteorological Center. A most impressive publication appeared two years later as a meteorological monograph (American Meteorological Society) entitled Statistical Inference and Prediction in Climatology. A Bayesian Approach. The seeds of this monograph go back to 1962 when he published a paper in the Journal of Applied Meteorology entitled "A Bayesian Approach to Decision Making in Applied Meteorology." Another major contribution during this period was a 162-page NOAA Technical Report in 1988 entitled "A Precipitation Climatology of 5-Day Periods."

When the AMS started a new publication called the journal of Climate in 1988, Dr. Epstein had a paper in the first issue entitled "A Spectral Climatology."  He has published three additional papers in that journal: a paper on 5-day precipitation with Anthony Barnston, a paper on the optimum number of harmonics to represent normals in 1991, and a paper on obtaining climatological values from monthly means, also in 1991'. In addition, he wrote an excellent review paper on long-range weather prediction in 1988 in another new AMS journal called Weather and Forecasting. The following year he and Allan Murphy published an important paper in Monthly Weather Review entitled "Skill Scores and Correlation Coefficients in Model Verification."