

Today, weather information is freely exchanged by many countries and scientists. Then he was assigned to the Air Force weather satellite research program, which was declassified decades ago, the information now freely available to the public. And he was sent eventually to the Pacific atoll of Eniwetok to research whether nuclear bomb explosions created “after wind” at the test site. He left the Army after the war, but a few years later, the military asked him to rejoin. The Army Air Corps “discovered they only had 12 meteorologists, and you can’t fly 30,000 planes with only 12 meteorologists,” said Haig.įollowing his training at the Meteorology Instrumentation School at Fort Monmouth, N.J., Haig operated stations in Bermuda and Saipan during World War II that located storms using radio direction finders to track lightning. a weather man,'" Haig recalled Wednesday morning after the ceremony at the Madison Club attended by friends and family. “They said ‘we own you - you’re going to be a meteorological cadet . The Ypsilanti, Mich., native wanted to become a pilot but flunked the eye exam. Haig volunteered for the Army Air Corps during World War II after President Franklin Roosevelt announced the urgent need for 30,000 pilots.
LIVE DOPPLER RADAR MADISON WI HOW TO
“He figured out how to stabilize the system so it was always looking where you wanted,” said Menzel. Paul Menzel, senior scientist at UW-Madison's Center for Satellite Applications & Research, said he didn’t know much about Haig’s work with the military when they worked together at the university because “it was part of the dark world.”īut he said Haig pioneered not only the instruments required to capture weather data but also how to display the information to the public in an easily understandable way. spacecraft including the Apollo program, as well as aircraft during Vietnam and the first Gulf War.Ī few years after retiring as an Air Force colonel in 1968, Haig came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to become executive director of the Space Science and Engineering Center, where he was instrumental in the development of the first global meteorological system. The weather information they generated also was used to determine when to launch U.S. The work Haig and his team did was classified, so he couldn’t talk about it for many years.
