Education
University of California, Berkeley. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
University of California, Berkeley. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Byers is most well known for his work as director of United States. Weather Bureau"s Thunderstorm Project in which, among other things, the modern cell morphology and life cycle of a thunderstorm were established. He is also known for his professional involvement with Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby and Tetsuya Theodore Fujita. During high school Byers developed a strong interest in journalism and worked as a reporter around the San Francisco Bay area, full-time for a year after graduation and then part-time while at the University of California, Berkeley.
At university he became acquainted with science in the geography department and chose atmospheric sciences as his career.
He graduated with an Bachelor of Arts degree in geography in 1929, afterward studying meteorology under Rossby and Hurd C. Willett at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on a fellowship from the Daniel Guggenheim Fund, receiving his Master of Surgery in 1932 with the thesis The Air Masses of the North Pacific. Byers joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1940, eventually helping establish the Department of Meteorology.
There he developed internationally renowned work during his 25 year tenure, about half of that as chairperson of the department, including work on cloud seeding with Louis J. Battan. In 1965 he moved to Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University (TAMU) and was the first dean of geosciences until his retirement in 1974.
(General Meteorology Formerly Published as Synoptic and Ae...)
(Natural sciences.)
National Academy of Sciences]
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (National Academy of Sciences, USA), president of the American Meteorological Society (American Mathematical Society), and the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics (IAMAP).