Robert M. (Bob) Cunningham (July 1, 1919 – April 15, 2008) was an American cloud physicist. He specialized in the study of fog, running a weather research station on

Kent Island Kent Island is the largest island in the Chesapeake Bay and a historic place in Maryland. To the east, a narrow channel known as the Kent Narrows barely separates the island from the Delmarva Peninsula, and on the other side, the island is sep ...

in the Bay of Fundy for over 60 years. Cunningham was born in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...

. He attended Shady Hill School and

the Cambridge School of Weston The Cambridge School of Weston (also known as CSW or The Cambridge School) is an independent, coeducational high school in Weston, Massachusetts. Currently, the school has 325 students in grades 9 to 12, with approximately 70% day students an ...

, where he built his first weather station. He first went to Bowdoin College's Scientific Research Station on Kent Island as a high school student in the summer of 1937. He set up a weather station and began collecting samples of fog water which were later subjected to chemical analysis. His first scientific paper on the subject was published in 1941. Cunningham attended the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT) from 1938 to 1942 and worked on an aircraft icing research team in the university's

meteorology Meteorology is a branch of the atmospheric sciences (which include atmospheric chemistry and physics) with a major focus on weather forecasting. The study of meteorology dates back millennia, though significant progress in meteorology did no ...

department during World War Two. He joined MIT's Weather Radar Research project as a graduate student when it was founded in 1946. He acted as the airborne observer in a program that involved comparing radar observations with those taken from airplanes during storms. His findings helped to establish that the " bright band" observed on radar displays was an artifact of melting snowflakes. Cunningham earned a PhD from MIT in 1952 and in 1953 became head of airborne cloud physics research at the

Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories The atmosphere of Earth is the layer of gases, known collectively as air, retained by Earth's gravity that surrounds the planet and forms its planetary atmosphere. The atmosphere of Earth protects life on Earth by creating pressure allowing f ...

. After retiring in 1979 Cunningham spent several years with the

World Meteorological Organization The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics. The WMO originated from the Intern ...

as field director of an international research project on precipitation enhancement. Throughout his career and until his death in 2008 Cunningham retained responsibility for the Kent Island weather station he had first set up in 1937. Observations were taken during the summer by staff and students of the Bowdoin College scientific station, and during the rest of the year by the station's resident warden. Cunningham contributed his analysis of decades of daily fog samples from Kent Island to research published in the 1980s on the effect of acid rain on forests. Cunningham lived in Lincoln, Massachusetts from 1948 until his death. He married Claire Steinhardt, an Austrian-born chemist and high school teacher, in 1945. They had three sons, one of whom is the photographer Peter Cunningham.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cunningham, , Robert M 1919 births 2008 deaths People from Cambridge, Massachusetts American meteorologists Shady Hill School alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni