Career Success is in the Forecast

Bradley Ballish

For as long as he can remember, Bradley A. Ballish, Ph.D., CAS ’72, had an interest in science, math and the weather. As a sixth grader growing up in Royal Oak — just 20 miles away from Oakland University — he paid close attention when his teacher showed the class how to use science and math to solve complex problems.

Dr. Ballish’s interest was further piqued when a weather balloon was launched during a class field trip to Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Harrison Township. A young Ballish asked so many insightful questions that he was given a set of gold wings that day. “Little did I know that many years later, I would be critiquing weather balloon sites for problems with their data and participating in setting international rules for such data as a research meteorologist,” he reports.

As a high schooler at Royal Oak Dondero, Ballish took honors science and math courses and excelled in chemistry. “Then I took physics and thought it was more fundamental than chemistry, so I decided to major in physics in college,” he recalls. His high school physics teacher, Ms. Winton, suggested that he look into continuing his education at Oakland University. “With her recommendation, plus having the school nearby with affordable tuition, made OU my choice,” Ballish says.

As an undergraduate, Ballish lived at home and commuted to OU. “I am very pleased to have attended Oakland University, where I received an excellent education while working part time,” he says. He earned the award for “outstanding freshman chemistry student” and landed a part-time job at a nearby chemistry lab.

During his second year at OU, Ballish worked part time sorting mail in the U.S. Postal Service in Royal Oak. There, he came across a government publication showing the previous week’s daily weather maps for North America. “Since I was always interested in the weather, I ordered and studied the maps, especially when we had significant weather,” Ballish recalls. At the time, he still planned to become a theoretical physicist.

OU’s physics professors John McKinley and Paul Tipler “were outstanding teachers and advisers who put considerable effort into their teaching,” Ballish says. Their mentorship served him well, not only as an undergraduate at OU but also in his graduate studies and later in his career at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The Sky’s the Limit
Ballish graduated from OU in 1972 with a Bachelor of Science in physics and was offered a teaching assistantship in the physics Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan. He headed to Ann Arbor after two years in the U.S. Army, where his extensive technical prowess led to his work with Pershing missiles in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

After two years at the University of Michigan, Ballish faced a poor job market in physics. His life would take a new trajectory after an impromptu visit to the office of Ferdinand Baer, Ph.D., in the atmospheric science department. Ballish’s questions about Professor Baer’s research led to Baer hiring him on the spot for a summer job. Two semesters later, Baer was offered the chairmanship of the newly created Department of Meteorology at the University of Maryland and asked Ballish, who, by that time, had earned master’s degrees in physics and atmospheric science, to join him at the University of Maryland.

Onward and Upward
“At Maryland, I wanted to apply Baer’s work on nonlinear normal mode initialization (NLNMI) to a global forecast model for my doctoral thesis,” Ballish reports. “This adjustment of the initial conditions of a forecast model would avoid excessive high-frequency oscillations in the model forecast.”

Joseph Sela, Ph.D., from the U.S. National Meteorology Center (NMC), National Weather Service and NOAA, wanted Ballish to work with him and his new forecast model using the NMC computers. “I did that work as part of my Ph.D. thesis, and when Sela’s model, known as the Global Forecast System (GFS),* became operational in 1980, my NLNMI package was part of the model, and I was hired as a research meteorologist,” Ballish says.

Over the years, Ballish improved the NLNMI and performed other work monitoring analyses and forecasts. “I became an expert at monitoring weather observations from all over the world,” he says. “Often, I would be involved in analyzing why we had a bad forecast. I was the international lead center expert on aircraft weather data for many years and sent reports on the quality, quantity and problems with these data to the airlines and other forecast centers.”

Ballish retired as a government employee in 2014 and then worked part-time as a contractor for four years. Now living in Georgia with his wife, Ballish attributes some of his career success to his foundational education at Oakland University. “I never had trouble figuring out problems and explaining them because I received such a good education at Oakland,” Ballish proclaims. For more information on his work, look him up on Google Scholar.