John A. Day

• Comment: so close to a good article, but the intro and other parts seem like an cv or resume Chihin.chong (tea and biscuits) 16:13, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

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John A. Day, also known as the 'Cloudman', was a notable American meteorologist, educator and evangelist for sky-watching. He helped Pan American Airways pilots chart new routes throughout the Asia Pacific region in the era before weather satellites and computers provided instant data. A photographer of nature and atmospheric phenomenon, he published numerous books, articles, atlases and cloud charts that explained the importance of weather in people’s daily lives. Popularly known as “The Cloudman” during his decades as both a college professor and lay advocate for cloud appreciation, he inspired students of all ages and fellow weather enthusiasts around the globe to “look up and see!”

Early Life and WWII

John Arthur Day was born on May 24, 1913 in Salina, Kansas, the first child of Lenora Wilson Day and Arthur Cutler Day. He grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and worked his way through college playing piano in Johnny Metzler’s orchestra. The band played in Pueblo one night; there he and Mary Hyatt danced, talked for a long time, and exchanged addresses. After a courtship conducted entirely via the US mail, they married in 1937, had five children, and were wed for 71 years.

Day graduated from Colorado College in 1936 as a physics/math major. Casting about for career options in the depths of the Depression, he heard the Boeing School of Aeronautics in Oakland, California guaranteed its graduates a job in the new and rapidly growing field of commercial aviation. He joined Boeing’s first class in the emerging field of Aviation Weather Forecasting and then went to work for Pan Am World Airways, helping chart new air routes throughout the Pacific region for the famous four-engine “California Clipper” flying boats. His assignments took him to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, New Caledonia and Japan.

In this primitive era before weather satellites, Pan Am had to build its own network of weather information and communication facilities using tiny Pacific atolls for bases, and forecasting was often a risky game of guesswork and guts. Day was responsible for providing accurate advance notice of inclement weather such as a rogue hurricane/typhoon or South Pacific cyclone along the 2000-mile over-water routes, ensuring passenger comfort and safety. Under the best conditions, with plentiful weather information coming in along the routes, this was a demanding job. Day had a solid record for accuracy: no mistakes accountable to weather factors during the 1936-41 period in which he was assigned to the Regional South Pacific Division.

When war broke out, the U.S. Navy took over Pan American Airways and Day became an instant lieutenant j.g.in the USN Transport wing. He was part of several pioneering efforts, including extending flight service to Australia. In 1946, Pan Am sent him from Manila to Tokyo to provide forecasting services for a special project, the transport of UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) personnel from the U.S to China. The chosen route was the previously unflown great circle along the Aleutians to Tokyo through a very weather-active region. Forecasts had to be made from a very sparse network of observing stations in mainland Asia and over the western Pacific Ocean. Today this route is the expressway of flights to the Orient.

Close shave with history

One of PanAm’s legendary episodes (as detailed in Ed Dover’s book The Long Way Home) was the groundbreaking trip undertaken by Captain Robert Ford immediately after Pearl Harbor to return the stranded Pacific Clipper back to New York City from Auckland NZ, via a never-before flown westerly route.

Day was stationed in Auckland as PanAm’s SoPac Regional Meteorologist at that time. The Boeing flying boat left Honolulu on Dec. 2, l941 on its usual southern trek, and had just arrived at Auckland five days later when the world learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ford was ordered to somehow get the Clipper back to a safe haven in LaGuardia Field, New York City. Ford and the crew’s navigator selected an itinerary with the least risk of encountering enemy aircraft and the best en-route refueling options. That meant flying across Australia to Darwin, to Surabaya, to Sri Lanka, up the west coast of India to Karachi, to Bahrain, to Khartoum, to Leopoldville, across the South Atlantic to Natal, then north by Port of Spain [Trinidad] to New York City.

Day was originally assigned to join the crew as flight meteorologist to interpret the weather situation en-route, but he was bumped at the last minute to lighten the payload. As Day recalled in his unpublished wartime journals, “Which was more important: Johnny Day’s advice or l60 pounds of aviation fuel? No contest. So on early Dec. l6 the Pacific Clipper took off in the dark, loaded to the gills with fuel and even two spare engines in case of an emergency, minus a weather advisor. Thanks to the skill of Capt. Ford and his crew, the Clipper was returned to its home base in NYC without serious negative incident, thus concluding one of the great annals in aviation history of which I narrowly missed being part.”

Post War Teaching Career

In 1946, reluctant to relocate his growing family to post-war Shanghai, Day left Pan Am to begin an academic career teaching physics at Oregon State College (OSC). Here, he and fellow professors Fred Decker, Bill Lowry and Russ Lincoln helped start OSC’s new meteorology department. They also founded the Oregon chapter of the American Meteorological Society , whose mission to be “open to all levels of experience and interests like students, teachers, professors, gardeners, arborists, federal, state & local government agencies, amateur & professional meteorologists, and storm chasers” reflected Day’s egalitarian philosophy of weather appreciation.

After earning his Ph.D in cloud physics from OSC in 1956, he taught at the University of Redlands in California from 1956-1958, then returned to Oregon to teach atmospheric sciences at Linfield College in McMinnville. In 1962-63 he received a National Science Foundation Science Faculty Fellowship to study cloud physics at Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, England where he investigated the relationship of bursting water droplets to the production of condensation nuclei. In May 1963 at the International Conference on Cloud Physics in Toulouse, France, he connected with Vincent J. Shaefer , the discoverer of dry-ice cloud seeding, with whom he would later collaborate on Peterson’s Field Guide to the Atmosphere (published in 1981, and honored for excellence in young science writing by the New York Academy of Sciences in 1982. ) Day subsequently published another volume in the series, Peterson’s First Guide to Clouds and Weather in 1991. He authored a total of eight meteorological, climate and environmental textbooks starting with Water, the Mirror of Science (1961, with Kenneth Davis) and most recently in 2002, The Book of Clouds, which featured the best of his photography and easy-to-understand explanations of weather phenomena.

In 1975, Day envisioned extending Linfield College’s educational mission beyond its McMinnville campus, and established Linfield’s Division of Continuing Education (DCE)/Adult Degree Program. This innovative partnership with Good Samaritan School of Nursing in Portland provided a means for registered nurses to obtain their BSN (bachelor of science in nursing) degrees. In 1982, the Linfield College/Good Samaritan School of Nursing became a division of Linfield College and the DCE now teaches nearly all of its courses online and enrolls students from all over the world. Though officially retired in 1978, Day continued teaching freshman meteorology as an adjunct professor emeritus until the age of 91. In 2002, Linfield trustees elected him to the Tall Oaks Society in recognition of meritorious service to the college.

Legacy

In the 1970s, he adopted the nickname "The Cloudman" which reflected his lifelong passion to help people understand and appreciate the impact of atmospheric phenomena in their everyday lives. His weekly column, “Words on the Weather,” for the McMinnville, Oregon News Register newspaper appeared in over 1000 installments from 1978-2007. During a 1971 sabbatical in England, he researched the connections between Luke Howard, the 18th century originator of cloud nomenclature, and J.M.M. Constable, the famous painter of cloudscapes, with the intention of writing a biography of Howard.

He photographed clouds for decades, seeking many outlets to share the beauty above that he felt often went unnoticed. His cloud images have been exhibited in public galleries including the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California and The Hong Kong Science Museum. His pictures served as a basis of the Skywatchers’ Cloud Chart, published in conjunction with an educational initiative, For Spacious Skies and was chosen as the official cloud chart for The Weather Channel, the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Service. He also started several businesses that tapped his vast photo collection: audiovisual cloud slide shows as relaxation therapy for hospital patients; Day Photo, enlarging and framing his pictures for displaying in local institutions; and Quiet Time Art Cards.

After years of lobbying the U.S. Postal Service to feature clouds on their stamps, in 2004 one of his pictures, a cumulus humilis cloud hovering over a local McMinnville red barn, was chosen to be featured in the USPS “Cloudscapes” series. With the advent of the Internet, his evangelism went global. In 1997, he launched the Cloudman.com website where his photographs inspired people all over the world to “Look Up and See the Beauty of the Sky.”

A life-long member of the United Methodist Church who taught an adult Sunday school class for over 40 years, Day and his wife Mary also attended Unity Church services and followed the teachings of mystic Joel Goldsmith and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin. He also edited his longtime friend Dr. Evarts Evarts Loomis' book Healing for Everyone: Medicine of the Whole Person.

Active till the very end, Day was working with a new collaborator, Jay Pasachoff, to revise Peterson's Field Guide to the Atmosphere to address the global impact of climate change and new discoveries in planetary atmospheric sciences (slated for publication in 2014). Day died June 21, 2008, at age 95, in McMinnville. In the Oregonian newspaper obituary, he was described as “both physicist and metaphysicist…who could speak of the science of clouds and of their beauty almost in the same breath.”