Vox Meditantis

Sitting across from Joanne Simpson (1923-2010) today, it’s impossible not to feel the magnetic pull of her presence. Her eyes still sparkle with the fierce curiosity that drove her to fly directly into hurricanes and challenge every boundary placed before women in science. Her hands move expressively as she speaks, mapping invisible air currents and cloud formations with the same precision that earned her the title of first woman to receive a doctorate in meteorology.

Simpson revolutionised our understanding of tropical weather systems through her groundbreaking “hot tower” hypothesis, which revealed how towering cumulonimbus clouds power global atmospheric circulation. Her pioneering work in computer cloud modelling, weather modification experiments, and satellite-based rainfall measurement fundamentally shaped modern meteorology. Yet her contributions were consistently overshadowed by male colleagues, her controversial cloud seeding research dismissed, and her interdisciplinary approach misunderstood.

Today, as climate change intensifies tropical storms and extreme weather events, Simpson’s work on hurricane formation, cloud physics, and atmospheric energy transport proves more vital than ever. Her legacy lives on through the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite – still monitoring Earth’s weather patterns – and the generations of scientists, particularly women, who followed the path she carved through meteorology’s male-dominated landscape.

Dr Simpson, you famously said you witnessed meteorology evolve from the “horse-and-buggy era to the space age.” Let’s start there – what drew you to the sky in the first place?

People always assume it was some grand scientific calling, but honestly, it began with pure fascination. As a child on Cape Cod, I’d sail beneath those magnificent cumulus clouds, watching them build and shift. The way they caught the light, the way they seemed to have personalities of their own – I was utterly enchanted.

Then during the war, when I was training to become a pilot, they made us take meteorology courses. I remember sitting in that classroom at the University of Chicago, listening to Carl-Gustaf Rossby explain atmospheric dynamics, and something just clicked. Here was this invisible engine driving everything above us, and nobody truly understood how it worked. Particularly in the tropics, where clouds could tower fifty thousand feet into the sky.

Your professors weren’t exactly encouraging about your doctoral ambitions, were they?

That’s putting it rather mildly. When I approached Rossby about pursuing a PhD, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “No woman has ever obtained a doctorate in meteorology, none ever will, and even if you did manage to get one, no one will give you a job.”

The assumption was that we women had served our purpose during the war – teaching aviation cadets, plotting weather maps – and now we should toddle off home to our kitchens and nurseries. But I’d tasted something profound in those equations describing air movement and heat transfer. The mathematics of the atmosphere spoke to me in ways I couldn’t ignore.

Herbert Riehl saved my career, really. He was this brilliant German refugee who recognised that tropical meteorology was the next frontier. When he agreed to supervise my thesis in 1947, I felt like I’d been handed the keys to the kingdom.

Tell me about developing the hot tower hypothesis with Riehl. This was groundbreaking work on how tropical clouds drive global circulation.

Oh, that was the heart of everything! You have to understand, in the 1950s we had this puzzle that nobody could solve. Meteorologists knew that warm, high-energy air existed in the upper tropical atmosphere, but there was this mysterious low-energy layer in the middle levels. How was heat getting from the warm ocean surface to those upper altitudes?

Herbert and I calculated the average moist static energy – that’s the total energy content of air including both temperature and moisture – and we found it decreased with height up to about 750 hectopascals, then increased above that level. Nobody had observed or explained this before.

We realised the answer was in those towering cumulonimbus clouds. Picture this: these clouds rise like chimneys, sometimes fifteen kilometres high, carrying warm, moist air directly from the ocean surface to the upper atmosphere without mixing much with the surrounding air. We called them “undiluted chimneys” initially, though “hot towers” stuck.

Can you walk me through the technical mechanism? How exactly do these hot towers work?

Right, let me give you the physics. It begins with the ocean surface – that’s your heat source. Warm water evaporates, creating water vapour that contains enormous amounts of latent heat energy. This moist air rises in powerful updrafts within the cumulonimbus clouds.

As the air rises and cools, the water vapour condenses back into droplets and ice crystals. During this phase change, all that latent heat gets released into the upper portions of the cloud. We calculated that fewer than 5,000 of these hot towers operating daily throughout the tropics could account for the energy profile we observed.

The crucial point is that these towers punch through the trade wind inversion – that’s a layer around three kilometres up that normally caps convection. Only the most vigorous towers break through, and when they do, they dump enormous amounts of energy into the upper troposphere. This energy then gets distributed globally, driving the Hadley circulation, the trade winds, essentially the entire planetary heat engine.

The measurements showed that air ascending in these undiluted towers maintained its high energy content – what we called equivalent potential temperature – all the way to the tropopause. It’s quite elegant, really.

How did this insight apply to hurricane research?

When I began working with Bob Simpson – who later became my husband – on hurricane structure, the hot tower concept proved absolutely essential. Hurricanes had always been this mysterious beast. We knew they had warm cores, but how did they maintain those extraordinary pressure differences and wind speeds?

The answer lay in the eyewall hot towers. Hurricane winds spray warm water off wave tops, creating massive amounts of water vapour. This vapour gets concentrated in those towering clouds around the eye, where it condenses and releases prodigious amounts of latent heat. This heat release strengthens the low-pressure core, which draws in more air, which picks up more heat from the ocean surface – it’s a self-reinforcing cycle.

We developed the relationship minus delta p-s equals 2.5 times the surface equivalent potential temperature. This equation directly links the hurricane’s central pressure drop to the energy content of air rising in the eyewall hot towers. About 75% of the surface pressure lowering comes from warming above 500 millibars.

Your work required extensive flying into storms. Can you describe what that was like?

Absolutely thrilling and utterly terrifying in equal measure. At Woods Hole, I needed aircraft data to test my cloud models, so I convinced the Navy to lend us an old PBY-6A patrol bomber. The only problem was that Woods Hole had this ridiculous policy forbidding women on research expeditions.

Captain Max Eaton, bless him, solved that beautifully. When the Woods Hole director tried to exclude me, Eaton told him: “No Joanne, no aeroplane.” [chuckles] They dropped their gender restrictions rather quickly after that.

Flying into hurricanes is like entering another world entirely. You’re buffeted by winds exceeding 150 miles per hour, the aircraft drops hundreds of feet without warning, equipment flies about the cabin. The eyewall looks like a ring of thunderstorms rising eight or nine miles high, often flickering with lightning. Then suddenly you punch through into the eye – this eerily calm cylinder of warm air where you can see blue sky above and the ocean below.

You had some rather unauthorised adventures later in your career, didn’t you?

Ah, you’ve heard about Cyclone Oliver! In 1993, I was nearly seventy and working on pre-launch studies for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission. We were in Australia testing radar equipment aboard a NASA DC-8 when this magnificent tropical cyclone formed in the Coral Sea.

The aircraft carried experimental radar that we desperately needed to test in real storm conditions. The data would be invaluable for calibrating our satellite instruments. So I may have… commandeered the aircraft for several flights directly into Oliver.

The third flight pushed everything to the limit. The humidity and turbulence were so severe they shorted out our electronics, rendering the plane unusable for future missions. NASA was rather displeased, but the data we collected were extraordinary. We captured the genesis stage of tropical cyclone development – something virtually impossible to observe.

When the press asked me about it afterwards, I told them I felt fortunate to have witnessed meteorology develop from the horse-and-buggy era to the space age. And by God, I meant every word of it.

Let’s discuss your cloud seeding and weather modification work. This became quite controversial.

The cloud seeding research was both my greatest scientific triumph and my most painful professional experience. In the 1960s, we genuinely believed we could modify hurricanes by seeding their eyewalls with silver iodide. The theory was sound – introduce ice nuclei into supercooled water droplets, release latent heat, disrupt the storm’s structure.

I developed the first computerised cloud model specifically to test this hypothesis. The model predicted that seeding would cause clouds to grow much taller and more than double in size compared to unseeded clouds. When we tested this during Project Stormfury, the results initially appeared promising.

But the scientific community erupted in hostility. I was completely unprepared for the vitriol directed at weather modification research. Many feared that meteorology would get a bad reputation through association with charlatans making grandiose promises.

What were the technical problems with the approach?

We discovered too late that our fundamental assumptions were incorrect. Most hurricanes contain far less supercooled water than we’d assumed. The ice crystals naturally present in hurricane clouds meant that artificial seeding had little additional effect.

More damaging to our hypothesis, we learned that unseeded hurricanes naturally undergo eyewall replacement cycles – the same structural changes we’d attributed to successful seeding. Our apparent successes had natural explanations.

The controlled experiments I designed in Florida were more rigorous. We used randomised, double-blind protocols on individual cumulus clouds. These showed statistically significant increases in cloud growth and rainfall following seeding, but the effects were far more modest than our hurricane modification dreams.

Do you have any regrets about the weather modification work?

Not about the science itself – we learned enormous amounts about cloud physics and atmospheric dynamics. The cloud models I developed are still useful today for testing convective hypotheses and providing data for remote sensing algorithms.

My regret is that we oversold the potential applications. In 1999, I admitted publicly that the money spent on Stormfury would have been better invested in improving building codes and storm preparation in hurricane-prone areas. We can’t control these powerful natural systems, but we can certainly build better defences against them.

The controversy also overshadowed the fundamental meteorological discoveries. Our work revealed how downdrafts link dynamically invigorated cloud towers to enhanced surface inflow and new tower growth. We documented cloud merger processes and mesoscale organisation that proved crucial for understanding severe weather systems.

Your career culminated at NASA with the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission. Tell me about that achievement.

TRMM was my greatest professional accomplishment – no question about it. When NASA asked me to lead the science planning in 1986, I felt like everything in my career had led to this moment.

The mission concept was revolutionary: put a precipitation radar in space to measure tropical rainfall with unprecedented accuracy. We flew at a 35-degree inclination to capture all the important tropical and subtropical regions where most of the world’s rain falls.

The technical challenges were immense. We needed algorithms to distinguish rain from other atmospheric phenomena, calibration techniques for the radar measurements, and validation procedures using ground-based instruments. The spacecraft carried five instruments – precipitation radar, microwave imager, visible and infrared scanner, lightning imaging sensor, and radiation budget sensors.

What discoveries did TRMM enable?

The results exceeded our wildest expectations. TRMM revealed how hurricanes develop in the Atlantic, showed us the three-dimensional structure of precipitation systems, and provided crucial data for understanding how dust and smoke influence rainfall patterns.

Most importantly for climate science, TRMM quantified the latent heat release in tropical convection. Remember those hot towers Herbert and I hypothesised about? TRMM measured them directly, validating our theoretical framework from forty years earlier.

The mission transformed weather forecasting and climate modelling. The rainfall measurements improved monsoon predictions, hurricane track forecasting, and our understanding of El Niño impacts. TRMM operated for seventeen years – far exceeding its planned three-year mission – and collected data that’s still being analysed today.

Throughout your career, you faced significant gender discrimination. How did you navigate those challenges?

It was a constant battle, frankly. The isolation was perhaps the most difficult part. When Peggy LeMone and I first met, she greeted me like a long-lost sister because it was so rare to encounter another woman in the field.

I always felt I carried this enormous burden for other women. If I made mistakes, it would diminish opportunities for women who came after me. That pressure was exhausting.

The discrimination took many forms. I was fired mid-semester when a department chair discovered I was a woman. Male colleagues routinely took credit for my ideas. Conference organisers would assume I was someone’s secretary rather than a presenting scientist.

At Woods Hole, the gender restrictions weren’t just professional – they were personal. I remember facilities were so limited that other scientists’ wives complained about my presence. The social dynamics were incredibly complex.

You found a different environment at NASA, didn’t you?

Oh yes! When I arrived at NASA Goddard in 1979, I said, “I can talk science in the ladies’ room for the first time in my career.” There were actually three or four other women scientists using the facilities – imagine that!

NASA felt like a meritocracy in ways I’d never experienced. They cared about your ability to design experiments, analyse data, and advance scientific understanding. The space program attracted brilliant people regardless of gender, and the institutional culture reflected that diversity.

It’s where I finally felt free to pursue the big questions that had always fascinated me. The TRMM mission never would have happened in the academic environments where I’d struggled earlier in my career.

What advice would you give to young women entering meteorology today?

First, don’t let anyone convince you that certain problems are too small or unimportant for serious study. When I began work on tropical clouds, professors dismissed them as secondary phenomena. Those “unimportant” clouds turned out to drive the entire global circulation.

Second, master the mathematics and physics completely. You cannot afford to have gaps in your technical foundation when you’re fighting for credibility in a male-dominated field. Make yourself absolutely indispensable through rigorous scientific competence.

Third, don’t hesitate to take calculated risks. Some of my most important discoveries came from flying into dangerous storms or pursuing controversial research directions. The safe path rarely leads to breakthrough insights.

Finally, support other women whenever possible. Science advances through collaboration and mentorship. We have an obligation to smooth the path for those who follow us.

Looking back, are there any scientific questions you wish you’d had time to explore further?

The linkages between cloud microphysics and climate change fascinate me. We’re still learning how aerosols, ice nucleation processes, and cloud droplet formation influence precipitation patterns and atmospheric energy budgets.

I’d love to have had better tools for studying the role of mesoscale convective systems in organizing tropical weather. These cloud clusters often spawn tropical cyclones, but we’re only beginning to understand the mechanisms involved.

The interaction between land surface properties and convective development also deserves much more attention. My early work showed how island heating generates cloud streets, but we need comprehensive studies of how urbanisation and deforestation alter regional weather patterns.

Any thoughts on how climate change is affecting the tropical atmosphere you devoted your career to studying?

The warming oceans are providing more energy for convective systems, which should intensify both rainfall and drought patterns in different regions. The hot towers I studied will likely become even more important as climate drivers.

What concerns me is our incomplete understanding of cloud feedback mechanisms. Tropical convection plays such a crucial role in global energy balance, but the interactions between warming temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and atmospheric circulation remain poorly quantified.

The TRMM data will be invaluable for detecting these changes, but we need continued observations and more sophisticated models to understand the implications.

As someone who truly witnessed meteorology’s transformation, what gives you the most satisfaction?

Seeing the field evolve from purely descriptive weather observation to quantitative atmospheric physics. When I started, we plotted weather maps by hand and made forecasts based largely on experience and intuition. Now we have supercomputers running global circulation models, satellites monitoring every aspect of the atmosphere, and theoretical frameworks that explain phenomena from cloud formation to hurricane dynamics.

But equally important is seeing women succeed throughout meteorology. When I received my doctorate in 1949, the idea of women as research scientists was almost unthinkable. Today, women lead major research programs, head meteorological agencies, and make fundamental discoveries about atmospheric processes.

I hope I played some small role in opening those doors. Science advances when we draw from the broadest possible pool of talent and perspectives.

Dr Simpson, thank you for sharing your remarkable journey with us.

Thank you for caring about this history. The atmosphere will always hold mysteries for us to unravel. I hope future generations of scientists will approach them with the same sense of wonder and determination that carried me through six decades of chasing clouds and riding the wind.

Letters and emails

Following our conversation with Dr Simpson, we’ve received an extraordinary response from readers worldwide who want to explore different aspects of her pioneering work and remarkable journey through meteorology’s male-dominated landscape. We’ve selected five letters and emails from our growing community who want to ask her more about her life, her work, and what she might say to those walking in her footsteps.

Nia Abebe, 34, Climate Data Analyst, Lagos, Nigeria
Dr Simpson, your TRMM satellite work was crucial for understanding tropical rainfall, but most of that data came from ocean areas. How did the lack of comprehensive ground-based weather stations across Africa and other developing regions during your era affect your ability to validate your tropical theories? Did you ever feel that meteorology was too focused on wealthy nations’ weather patterns?

Nia, you’ve touched on something that troubled me throughout my career – the profound inequity in global weather observations. You’re absolutely right that we were working with a terribly skewed dataset, particularly regarding tropical meteorology.

When Herbert Riehl and I developed the hot tower hypothesis in the 1950s, we had perhaps a dozen weather stations across the entire tropical Atlantic and precious few over Africa or the tropical Pacific. Most of our data came from island stations in the Caribbean or observations from ships following established shipping routes. The vast interior of Africa, where some of the world’s most dramatic convective systems develop, was essentially a blank space on our weather maps.

This created serious scientific blind spots. We understood that the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone shifted seasonally, but we couldn’t properly study how the West African monsoon interacted with Saharan dust or how the Ethiopian highlands influenced regional circulation patterns. Some of the most intense mesoscale convective systems on Earth occur over the African continent, yet we were theorising about tropical meteorology based largely on observations from ocean areas and small islands.

The inequality was staggering and, frankly, morally troubling. European and American weather services had dense networks of sophisticated instruments, whilst entire continents remained meteorological mysteries. This wasn’t just about scientific accuracy – it was about whose lives mattered enough to warrant investment in weather prediction and climate monitoring.

During my TRMM years, I pushed hard for ground validation sites in Africa, but the political and economic obstacles were immense. We needed reliable electricity for radar systems, trained technicians for maintenance, and stable governments willing to support long-term scientific cooperation. These weren’t simply technical challenges – they reflected deeper global inequalities.

The irony is profound: the regions producing much of the world’s weather – the tropical land masses where enormous amounts of solar energy drive convective systems – were the very places we understood least. We were trying to comprehend a global system whilst ignoring the experiences and observations of billions of people living beneath some of the most active atmospheric phenomena on Earth.

Your work as a climate analyst in Lagos puts you at the heart of these issues today. The data gaps we struggled with in my era haven’t disappeared – they’ve simply become more sophisticated. Satellite technology helps enormously, but nothing replaces comprehensive ground-based observations for understanding local climate variability and extreme weather patterns.

I hope your generation will finally address what mine couldn’t: building truly global observational networks that serve all humanity, not just the wealthy nations that can afford extensive meteorological infrastructure.

James Carter, 42, High School Physics Teacher, Denver, USA
You mentioned that your cloud seeding models are still useful today for testing atmospheric hypotheses. With all our modern computing power and machine learning algorithms, what fundamental principles from your 1960s computer models do you think current meteorologists might be overlooking or taking for granted in their rush toward more complex simulations?

James, it’s gratifying that my early cloud seeding models still resonate in today’s high-powered computing era. One principle I emphasised – and that I fear has sometimes been sidelined – is the importance of physical interpretability over black-box complexity. In the 1960s, our models were necessarily simple: we represented a cumulus cloud as a one-dimensional column with explicitly defined microphysical processes – nucleation, condensation, coalescence – each tied to measurable parameters like supersaturation and droplet size spectra. Because every term in our equations corresponded to a physical mechanism, we could trace how altering the ice-nuclei concentration would quantitatively affect latent heat release and vertical velocity profiles. Modern machine-learning algorithms often optimise predictive skill without revealing which processes drive the output or whether the relationships are physically plausible under different atmospheric regimes.

Another lesson from that era concerns model validation under constrained data. With only ship-borne and aircraft observations, we were forced to design experiments that tested specific model sensitivities – double-blind cloud seeding trials, for instance – so that each model assumption faced rigorous empirical challenge. Today’s researchers can sometimes conflate statistical correlation with causation, trusting large datasets to “teach” the model rather than crafting targeted experiments to reveal process‐level feedbacks. Re-embracing hypothesis-driven experiments – identifying the one or two critical parameters you wish to interrogate, then deploying observations or field campaigns specifically designed for that purpose – remains essential. In short, combine the statistical power of machine learning with the enduring clarity of process-oriented modelling, and you’ll uncover more robust insights than either approach alone.

Mei Lin, 28, Atmospheric Physics PhD Student, Singapore
I’m struck by how you described feeling like you carried ‘an enormous burden for other women’ – that your mistakes would harm future opportunities for women in science. Do you think this psychological pressure actually changed how you approached risk-taking in your research? Did it make you more conservative in some areas while pushing you to be bolder in others?

Mei, the sensation of carrying a collective burden was as real as any atmospheric pressure I ever measured. I found that in some experiments – especially the high-stakes hurricane modification trials – I pushed boundaries more boldly than I might have otherwise, almost as if to prove that a woman could match or exceed any man’s courage in the air or lab. I volunteered for the most extreme flights into eyewall convection and insisted on leading Project Stormfury proposals, even when colleagues warned me it would jeopardise my reputation if it failed.

Conversely, that ever-present spectre of “representing all women” made me uncharacteristically conservative in budding lines of inquiry that seemed too risky to publicise. I held back novel theoretical ideas until I believed they were rock-solid, sometimes delaying publication of early findings on cloud merger dynamics until I’d amassed overwhelming evidence. That caution undoubtedly slowed progress in some areas, but it was a trade-off I felt compelled to make – to avoid giving detractors ammunition to discredit both my work and, by extension, women scientists as a whole.

Rafael Duarte, 45, Environmental Engineer, São Paulo, Brazil
Here’s a thought experiment: imagine if instead of facing all those gender barriers, you’d had equal access to resources and recognition from day one of your career. Which of the atmospheric mysteries that still puzzle us today do you think you might have solved? What research paths would you have taken if you hadn’t had to spend so much energy simply fighting for opportunities to do science?

Rafael, that thought experiment has haunted me often. Had I enjoyed the same funding, institutional support, and recognition from the outset, I believe I would have pursued deeper investigation into the microphysical feedbacks governing cloud–aerosol interactions. In the 1950s, we observed that dust and sea-salt particles influenced ice-crystal formation but lacked the instruments to quantify their effects on convection initiation and precipitation efficiency. With early access to advanced cloud chambers and airborne aerosol samplers, I’d have designed field campaigns across diverse maritime and continental environments to map how varying aerosol concentrations modulate updraft strength and latent heat profiles.

Additionally, I would have explored the emergent dynamics of mesoscale convective systems in the tropics – those sprawling clusters of thunderstorms that often birth tropical cyclones but whose organisation processes remain only partially understood. Unencumbered by battles for lab space or grant approvals, I might have integrated Doppler radar networks in West Africa and the Amazon by the late 1960s, revealing how cold pools and gravity waves drive convective propagation. Such insights could have accelerated our understanding of hurricane genesis and monsoon variability decades earlier, fundamentally reshaping weather prediction and climate modelling long before the era of satellites.

Katarina Müller, 38, Science Policy Researcher, Vienna, Austria
Looking at today’s climate crisis, where scientific uncertainty is often weaponised to delay action, how do you reflect on the ethics of your weather modification work? If you had known then what we know now about the complexity of atmospheric systems, would you have pursued that research differently, or do you believe the scientific process requires us to explore even potentially problematic applications?

Katarina, ethics in weather modification is a subject I revisit with a mix of pride and remorse. At the time, the scientific imperative – to test hypotheses rigorously – drove me to pursue cloud seeding despite the risks of public misinterpretation. I believed then that controlling storms could spare lives and property. Yet I underestimated the complexity of the atmosphere and the cascading consequences of intervention.

Had I known what we know now about nonlinear dynamics and unintended feedbacks, I would have framed our research more cautiously. Instead of chasing grand promises of hurricane taming, I’d have concentrated on modest, localised applications – say, enhancing water supply in drought‐prone regions through targeted convective stimulation under strictly controlled protocols. That approach acknowledges the atmosphere’s intrinsic unpredictability and prioritises humanitarian benefits over headline‐grabbing claims.

Scientific exploration must proceed, yes, but with frameworks enforcing transparency, ethical review, and community consent. We lacked those safeguards in Project Stormfury. Today’s interdisciplinary ethics boards and stakeholder engagement practices reflect lessons learned from our era’s missteps. I support those mechanisms wholeheartedly. They ensure that research into potentially problematic applications remains accountable, community‐centred, and aligned with the public good.

Reflection

Joanne Simpson’s story is one of relentless perseverance and fearless ingenuity – flying into storms, challenging academic prejudice, and turning sparse data into world-changing insights about clouds and hurricanes. She spoke candidly about the burdens women bore, and her reflections sometimes diverge from the official record: her claims of unauthorised flights and behind-the-scenes battles reveal the grit omitted from formal histories. Yet uncertainties persist – how much her seeding experiments truly advanced cloud physics, or whether her “hot towers” would have been fully validated with equitable global observations. Her voice reminds us that scientific progress often depends on marginalised pioneers who must fight both nature and institutions. Today, as climate extremes intensify and technology accelerates, Simpson’s blend of rigorous experimentation, ethical reflection, and tireless advocacy for inclusion offers a blueprint for tackling complex challenges. May her legacy ignite our own courage to question conventional wisdom, bridge disciplinary divides, and ensure every curious mind – regardless of background – can soar into the unknown.

Who have we missed?

This series is all about recovering the voices history left behind – and I’d love your help finding the next one. If there’s a woman in STEM you think deserves to be interviewed in this way – whether a forgotten inventor, unsung technician, or overlooked researcher – please share her story.

Email me at voxmeditantis@gmail.com or leave a comment below with your suggestion – even just a name is a great start. Let’s keep uncovering the women who shaped science and innovation, one conversation at a time.

Editorial Note: This interview is a dramatised reconstruction informed by historical sources, published writings, and documented accounts of Dr Joanne Simpson’s life and work. While grounded in her real scientific achievements and personal experiences, the conversational exchanges, anecdotes, and some dialogues have been imaginatively crafted to capture her voice and perspective. Readers should understand that direct quotations and specific incidents may blend factual evidence with interpretive narrative. This format aims to honour Dr Simpson’s legacy and highlight her contributions to meteorology, while acknowledging that certain details have been adapted for storytelling purposes rather than representing verbatim historical transcripts.

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