Wallace P. Reed

2LT Wallace Patillo Reed (November 22, 1919 – November 12, 1999) was a World War II U.S. Army officer, U.S. military meteorologist, and the first ever African-American meteorologist in the U.S. military. Reed served at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama as the chief weather officer responsible for the all-African American Tuskegee Airmen. Reed regularly advised Tuskegee Airmen pilots and instructors on weather maps and forecasts.

Reed is believed to have been the first ever African-American meteorologist at the U.S. Weather Bureau, the predecessor organization of the National Weather Service.

Graduating from Portsmouth High School in 1937, Reed attended the University of New Hampshire, where he earned a degree in mathematics.

In 1942, Reed graduated from a specialized training course at MIT.

Military service At the beginning of the 1940s, the U.S. Army possessed only 62 qualified weather forecasters. To remain a highly functional operation, the Army Air Forces anticipated a minimal requirement of 10,000 weather forecasters and weather observers.

To train a sufficient number of military weather forecasters, the Army Air Forces set up a weather cadet program in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), New York University (NYU) and the California Institute of Technology (CIT), and later with the University of Chicago, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and a special Army Air Forces program in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Weather Officer Corps As a lieutenant and as later as a captain, Reed created a fully operational weather station to provide up-to-date forecasts and weather briefings to flight school officers and instructors. Though his weather detachment's officer corps represented only 0.2 percent of all U.S. military weather officers, When he began his career at Tuskegee, Reed had five enlisted weathermen in his ranks, all of them trained at Chanute Field. Upwards of forty enlisted men would work under Reed at Tuskegee. Based on performance and standardized testing, the vast majority of Reed's enlisted staffers were awarded the AAF Weather Observer Badge. Reed became an official with the U.S. Weather Bureau at Nichols Field in Manila, working there for over 30 years until returning to the United States years later. They had two children, son Reynoldo N. Reed and daughter Erlinda N. Reed.

Death On November 12, 1999, he died in Los Angeles, California. He is interred at Roosevelt Memorial Park in Los Angeles.