Robert Houze

Born in Texas in 1945, Houze grew up in College Station, near Texas A&M University, where he received a B.S. in Meteorology in 1967. He then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from which he received an M.S. in Meteorology in 1969, followed by a Ph.D. in Meteorology in 1972.[4] At MIT, his mentor was Pauline Austin, a pioneer of using radar to study weather.[5] After completing his Ph.D., Houze joined the University of Washington as an assistant professor in 1972 and rose to the level of full professor in 1983. In 1988-89, he taught at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich as a guest professor. At the University of Washington, he has mentored 24 Ph.D.s.[4]

Houze is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, and in 2006, he was awarded the Society’s highest research award, the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal.[6] He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and in 2012 he delivered the Union’s Bjerknes Lecture.[7] In 2013, he became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, and in 2014 he received that Society’s highest research award, the Symons Gold Medal.[8]

During 2015-2018 Houze was designated as a laboratory fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.[9]

In 2017, the Robert A. Houze Jr. Symposium was organized to honor him at the American Meteorological Society's Annual Meeting.[1]

When he arrived at the University of Washington in 1972, Houze began developing what became known as his Mesoscale Group. With this group, he conducted research for over 46 years. In the early years, he participated in the Global Atmospheric Research Programme’s Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE)—the largest field campaign ever to study weather.[10] In GATE, he was on board a ship instrumented with radar, and was one of the first to use radar to document a tropical squall line.[9] Soon after GATE, he joined the international Monsoon Experiment (MONEX), in which he conducted radar studies on clouds in the winter monsoon in Malaysia in 1978-79. The MONEX study was one of the first field campaigns to collect airborne radar data.[11]

Since these projects he has conducted radar studies over all the major oceans and over mountain ranges in Europe and North America. The GATE experience launched a career of using radar on ships, islands and aircraft in field campaigns around the world—in northern Australia, Malaysia, India, Africa, the Italian Alps, the Solomon Islands, the Maldives, and various locations in the U.S.—especially to study fronts passing over the Cascade and Olympic Mountains, to fly into hurricanes over the Gulf, Atlantic, and Pacific, and to study thunderstorms over Kansas.[1] In 2015, he led OLYMPEX in which numerous state-of-the-art radars were used to study how frontal storms moving from the Pacific Ocean over the Olympic Mountains produce enormous rainfall in the rain forests of northwestern North America.[12][13]

• 1982 - Editor’s Award, American Meteorological Society
• 1982 - Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award, American Meteorological Society
• 1983 - Fellow of the American Meteorological Society
• 2001 - Highly Cited Researcher, Institute of Scientific Information[9]
• 2006 - Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, American Meteorological Society
• 2012 - Fellow of the American Geophysical Union
• 2012 - Bjerknes Lecture, American Geophysical Union
• 2013 - Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• 2014 - Symons Gold Medal of the Royal Meteorological Society[8]
• 2014 - Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society