Meet the Chief Scientist: Dr. Margaret (Peggy) LeMone

Dr. Margaret (Peggy) LeMone is an atmospheric scientist who traces her interest in weather to the day lightning struck her house. She was eight years old at the time, and gave her first talk on weather at school during Show and Tell the next day. She showed the rest of her class parts of the roof that had been destroyed by the lightning, and parts of chairs that were destroyed by falling bricks. LeMone is actively involved in scientific research as a Senior Scientist at NCAR. Her main current research interests are in the interaction between the atmosphere and land surface during both daytime and nighttime conditions. It is these interests that attracted her to GLOBE, since such studies often suffer from outdated characterization of the land surface.

LeMone has been primarily a field scientist, having participated in about 25 field campaigns, playing a major leadership role in many. Her first major field effort was the GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE), which involved 72 countries in studying the weather and climate in West Africa and the Atlantic Ocean. During GATE, she lived in Dakar, Senegal, for a summer. Other field efforts have taken her to Australia, the Solomon Islands, Mexico, and Taiwan. She received her A.B. in Mathematics at the University of Missouri in 1967, and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1972. In her early career, she combined numerical models and observations to study the structure of and transports through the fair weather planetary boundary layer (that part of the atmosphere directly affected by the ground) and its interaction with clouds. More recently, she has also focussed on how lines of thunderstorms affect the wind from the surface to cloud top, using aircraft and Doppler-radar observations, and comparing the results of observational studies to idealized models as well as earth-atmosphere interaction.

She has published over 70 articles in science journals, and over a hundred conference reports, articles in World Book Encyclopedia, and other popular venues. She has worked on several textbooks, including a high school earth science text. She is author of The Stories Clouds Tell, a short booklet published by Project ATMOSPHERE of the American Meteorological Society.

LeMone is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.