Edward Epstein

Edward Epstein (April 29, 1931, in The Bronx, New York City – October 14, 2008, in Potomac, Maryland) was an American meteorologist who pioneered the use of statistical methods in weather forecasting and the development of ensemble forecasting techniques.

Education and early career According to his obituary in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), Epstein's years in middle school and high school were marked by "illustrious academic achievements." Graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1947, he applied at the age of 15 to Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, and was accepted to all three. He entered Harvard on a full scholarship at age 16.

He graduated from Harvard in 1951 with a Bachelor of Science in Astronomy. He studied statistics at the Graduate School of Business Administration at Columbia University, and received an M.B.A. in 1953. During this period he participated in Columbia's Conservation of Human Resources Project.

Career BAMS describes Epstein as having been "assisted in his career choice by the U.S. government, which offered him the options of being drafted, entering Officer's Candidate School and becoming a naval supply officer, or attending Penn State as an air force officer and studying meteorology." Until then, he had never heard of meteorology, but chose the latter because of his keen interest in science. He was in the Air Force from 1953 to 1957, and received a Master of Science degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1954.

After attending the Officer's Basic Military Course at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas in 1954, he was assigned to do research under the auspices of the Air Force Cambridge Research Center. He then went to Flagstaff, Arizona, to determine the vertical distribution of atmospheric ozone. According to BAMS, the paper that resulted, "A New Method for Determining the Vertical Distribution of Ozone from a Ground Station," "established his reputation as a research scientist" and "led to his being invited by Penn State to pursue a doctorate in meteorology." He received a Ph.D. in meteorology from that institution in 1960.

In the late 1950s Epstein worked at Arizona State University and then at Penn State.

Epstein's and Murphy's paper "A Note on Probability Forecasts and 'Hedging,'" published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology in 1967, "introduced the term 'proper' in connection with forecasts and scoring systems," according to BAMS, which noted that new scoring systems "are almost always subjected to this 'properness' test." BAMS said that this paper was perhaps Epstein's "most profound scientific achievement," adding that Epstein's "concept was so visionary that human and computer resources have not yet been able to capitalize fully on it."

He continued to work on this topic after returning to Michigan, where he published several related papers in collaboration with two of his students, Rex Fleming and Eric Pitcher.

Climate Analysis Center In 1983 Epstein joined the National Weather Service's National Meteorological Center as chief scientist of the Climate Analysis Center, and it was there that he published his influential meteorological monograph "Statistical Inference and Prediction in Climatology: A Bayesian Approach."

Epstein went on to publish several other papers in The Journal of Climate, including one about the optimum number of harmonics to represent normals and another about obtaining climatological values from monthly means.

Epstein went on to publish a number of informal research papers which "appeared as NMC office notes, in proceedings of climate diagnostic workshops, and in preprints of AMS conferences." The papers "focused on removing systematic errors in numerical models, making objective 6- to 10-day forecasts of temperature and precipitation in probability form, and developing new statistical techniques such as the imperfect prog method and the Kalman filter (which he discussed yesterday at 5IMSC)."