Roger Lhermitte

Roger M. Lhermitte (May 28, 1920 – November 21, 2016) was a French meteorologist who "pioneered the development of meteorological Doppler radar." His career extended from the 1950s until his death where he made numerous contributions to the field of radar meteorology resulting in over 100 publications and numerous patents.

Early life and education Roger Lhermitte was born in Ergal, a hamlet of Jouars-Pontchartrain in the Yvelines, France, on 28 May 1920. During the occupation of Germany in France in World War II, he was compulsorily enlisted by the Germans to work for Siemens in Berlin.

Lhermitte first went to North America as a visitor to the Stormy Weather Group in Montreal, QC. He left Paris on January 2, 1955, arriving the next day.

In 1964 Edwin Kessler had just become director of National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) and was coordinating efforts to build a weather radar program. He had maintained contact with Roger, and reached out to him to join this new program. Lhermitte left the Sperry Rand Research center in early 1964 for this new venture to work with Kessler, K. Wilk, Dale Sirmans and others. The weather radar was built in 1987. Its design and implementation is described in Lhermitte's 1987 paper "A 94-GHz Doppler Radar for Cloud Observations". This was later explored by Pavlos Kollias et al. in a paper entitled "Why Mie?":

Publications

Patents Atmospheric motion non-coherent pulse doppler system (July 6, 1965) Method and means of determining variability of atmospheric motion with respect to altitude (July 27, 1965) Atmospheric Motion Coherent Pulse Doppler Radar System (October 12, 1965) Radar tornado alarm (September 6, 1966) Waveform Averaging and Contouring Device For Weather Radars And The Like (January 30, 1968)

Selected publications

Lhermitte, R. (1959), La representation directe du spectre de fluctuation des echos radars donnes par des precipitations, 248, 1554-1556 Lhermitte, R. (1958), Sur la fluctuation des echos de precipitations, C. R. Acad. Sci., 246, 1245-1248 Lhermitte, R., and R. Serafin (1984) "Pulse-to-pulse coherent Doppler sonar signal processing techniques," J. Atmos. and Ocean. Technol., vol. 1, pp 293–308 Lhermitte, R. (1987) "A 94 GHz Doppler Radar for Cloud Observations." J. Atmos. Ocean . Tech., 4 (1), 36‐48