January 1, 1917–June 16, 1981

BY NORMAN A. PHILLIPS

JULE CHARNEY WAS one of the dominant figures in atmospheric science in the three decades following World War II. Much of the change in meteorology from an art to a science is due to his scientific vision and his thorough commitment to people and programs in this field.

In 1946 he married Elinor Kesting Frye, a student of logic and semantics with H. Reichenbach at the University of California at Los Angeles. They had two children, Nora and Peter. Nicolas, Elinor's son from her previous marriage, assumed the last name of Charney. Their marriage lasted almost twenty-one years. In 1967 Jule married Lois Swirnoff. Lois is a painter and color theorist and was a professor at UCLA and Harvard. Their marriage lasted almost ten years. Jule shared the last years of his life with Patricia Peck, a photographic artist with roots in New York City and Venice. His last illness was lung cancer, from which he died in Boston on June 16, 1981.

Jule was born on New Year's Day 1917 in San Francisco. His parents, Stella and Ely Charney, had immigrated early in the century from White Russia, where the lot of Jewish citizens was difficult. Each of them had taken up work in