Douglas K. Lilly was a renowned meteorologist who had a significant impact on the field of atmospheric sciences. Although Lilly completed his undergraduate work in physics at Stanford University on a Navy ROTC scholarship, he always envisioned going into meteorology. His interest in meteorology was already evident during his undergraduate years, but circumstances led him to pursue physics, which he believed provided a solid foundation for his future career in meteorology.  After serving his time in the Navy, Lilly attended graduate school at Florida State University in Tallahassee with a one year break spent in Germany working for Radio Free Europe flying balloons with propaganda into Eastern Europe. After graduate school Lilly spent five years working at the United States Weather Bureau, before NCAR was established. Lilly visited NCAR in his fourth year at the Bureau and decided to move their permanently in 1964, where he made significant contributions to the field of atmospheric dynamics.

Scope and Content Note

This interview with Douglas K. Lilly, conducted on August 8th, 1988, provides a comprehensive overview of Lilly's education, career, and contributions to the field of meteorology. Doug Lilly begins the interview by discussing his educational training prior to arriving at NCAR,  starting from his undergraduate studies in physics at Stanford University to his graduate studies at Florida State in Tallahassee. Lilly also shares his experiences working for Radio Free Europe during the early Cold War era, where he was involved in a unique project of flying propaganda balloons into Eastern Europe. The interview also covers Lilly's time at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where he worked under the leadership of Phil Thompson in the atmospheric dynamics group. Lilly reminisces about working with some of NCAR’s first generation computing systems and provides some impressions about the people, culture and facilities at NCAR at the time of his arrival. Lilly speaks about his research goals and preference for being involved in smaller-scale activities rather than large-scale field programs like the GARP project, although he was involved in the formulation of some of these programs. Lilly provides personal insight and general observations into NCAR’s strengths and weaknesses in research, management, organization and culture throughout the years. Lilly discusses his avoidance of big-field programs and his preference for more focused research. He also shares his views on NCAR's major contributions, highlighting the work of Jim Deardorff on turbulence simulation and boundary layer numerical simulation. The interview provides valuable insights into Lilly's career trajectory, his research interests, and his perspectives on the field of meteorology.

Copyright Information: Copyright University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.