Reginald Cockcroft Sutcliffe, 16 November 1904 - 28 May 1991

Abstract

Reginald Sutcliffe's career as a meteorologist - first as a civil servant and later as a university professor - spanned a period of more than four decades during which there were remarkable changes in the extent of meteorological knowledge and in the manner of its application. In the 1920s, when Sutcliffe entered the scene, there was a basic understanding of the physics and thermodynamics involved in weather systems, and the equations of motion had been formulated for an atmosphere on a rotating globe, but weather forecasting was almost entirely a matter of experience and empiricism, dominated by the then new Norwegian frontal theory. Climatology was a matter of simple statistics of basic weather elements. Meteorological research was in the hands of scattered individuals, specialists in some aspect of the science. By the 1970s, when Sutcliffe retired, the prediction of weather systems had been put on a quantitative basis with numerical computation on electronic computers of both the physics and dynamics. The study of climate had been transformed into the study of the physics and dynamics of the atmosphere on the grandest scale, and substantial scientific teams were working on these problems in both universities and meteorological services. Professor R.C. Sutcliffe played a noteworthy role in bringing all these changes about.