Education
He received his Bachelor of Science from Laval University in 1952 and his Master of Science from the University of Toronto in 1953.
He received his Bachelor of Science from Laval University in 1952 and his Master of Science from the University of Toronto in 1953.
Born in New York, New York in 1928, Robert moved to Grand-Mère, Quebec in May 1937. He began employment with the Meteorological Service of Canada as a weather forecaster, then in 1959 shifted his interest to research in atmospheric models for short and medium-range numerical weather prediction. Between 1963 and 1970, Robert developed the semi-implicit time integration algorithm for an efficient integration of the primitive equations for numerical weather prediction and climate models.
Several weather centres in the world adopted this algorithm for their models (Canada in 1974, Australia in 1976, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in 1977, United States of America in 1980).
In 1980, Robert successfully combined his semi-implicit scheme with existing Lagrangian techniques which allows the use of much longer time steps and hence produces a very efficient integration of meteorological equations. Robert retired from the Canadian Meteorological Centre in Montreal in 1987 and took a Faculty position at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
There he worked with colleagues to develop a fully elastic atmospheric model that relaxed the hydrostatic approximation used by all large-scale climate and numerical weather prediction models, thus paving the way to a universal model formulation usable at all scales. The resulting model came to be known by the name of Mesoscale Compressible Community model (MC2).
Robert"s career was devoted to developing and implementing numerical techniques to solve the interacting time-dependent partial differential equations governing the chronological development of atmospheric behavior in an efficient manner, while still retaining accuracy.
In contrast to many scientists who were concerned only with precision.