In Our Own Words...

As the National Weather Service celebrates its 150th Anniversary in 2020, NWS employees and retirees are sharing their own memories and thoughts about our heritage. Read their stories in their own words below.

We at the NWS Heritage Project can’t complete such an enormous task without you! Whether you’re a current or former employee of the NWS, your memories and stories help us better understand the history of our agency, how we got to where we are today, and where we will go next. If you’re interested in writing a story or even providing us with some background information on an event, technology, era, or other memory from your time at the NWS, please check out the following guide and forms:

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Alexander MacDonald

Alexander MacDonald

Prototyping a Technological Cornerstone of the Modernization Era

Editor’s Note: In 2010, NOAA Office of Atmospheric Research Communications Director Barry Reichenbaugh recorded a series of oral histories with key researchers and others involved in the National Weather Service Modernization and Associated Restructuring, or MAR, during the 1980s and 90s. These oral histories have been republished on the Voices of NOAA website. 

One of the most crucial elements of the Modernization era of the National Weather Service was the improvement of forecasting and warning services — can we issue forecasts earlier? Can the forecasts be more accurate? How do we maximize our ability to protect life and property? When it came to technological development in this area, many people were instrumental in revolutionizing the forecasting systems, including Alexander “Sandy” MacDonald.

MacDonald joined the National Weather Service in 1975 working in the Western Region’s Scientific Services Division before moving to NOAA’s Environmental Research Laboratory in 1980. Later in his career he served as Director of NOAA’s largest research laboratory, the Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colorado. From the beginning, he acknowledged that the computer and tech revolution had arrived, and pushed for the creation of an integrated system that would incorporate all of the old technologies to improve weather warnings. Working to that end, MacDonald and his team had to construct several prototypes of the new system in order to show Congress what they were trying to do, certainly no small feat. Those prototypes eventually evolved into AWIPS, an integrated processing system that became a technological cornerstone of the Modernization era. 

Here are two excerpts from his interview recorded October 2010: 

On the partnership between research and operations:

“You had this coming together of two parts of NOAA. One of them is the research part saying, ‘we want to help you build this’ and one is the operational part, where you have a visionary and leader like [NWS Director] Dick Hallgren who knows the system and says, ‘I want to build a National Weather Service that is modernized and uses all the data in the right way and what I expect to get out of this is a big improvement in our ability to put out weather warnings.’  And nobody can argue with that. That’s clearly a government function: protect the people.” 

On the approach of building early prototypes:

“We're going to build a version of this system that, even in the first year, it really is pretty limited and it isn’t anything like what we ultimately want. We're going to actually get software people and build one. Nowadays that’s called rapid prototyping and I think it's the absolute key to the fact that we really progressed pretty fast.”

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