John E. Hales Jr.

Hales was born in Long Beach, California in 1942, and spent his childhood in Claremont and Whittier, CA. He attended the University of Utah, earning B.S. (1965) and M.S. (1967) degrees in meteorology.^[3]

Hales entered government service as a summer intern in the United States Weather Bureau (USWB; former name of the National Weather Service (NWS)) student trainee program while still an undergraduate student. His first duty station was at the Bakersfield, CA airport office, where he took surface observations during the summer of 1962. In 1963 he served at the Los Angeles forecast office. While at the Los Angeles office, he participated in a local sea-breeze research project releasing pilot balloons (PIBALs) near Lake Elsinore in southern California to assess the vertical wind structure in the lower atmosphere.^[3]

In 1967 at the conclusion of his graduate studies, he resumed his USWB career as a weather observer at the Seattle-Tacoma airport. Two years later, Hales was promoted to general forecaster at the Phoenix, AZ weather office, tasked with creating adaptive forecasts under the guidance of the Albuquerque, NM district forecast office. In 1972, Phoenix became the state forecast office for Arizona as part of a major NWS field structure reorganization. At this time Hales was promoted again to a lead forecaster at Phoenix, serving as shift leader for all forecast and warning activities in the state while on duty.

Owing to his outstanding forecasting skills coupled with his seminal meteorological research focused on the U. S. southwest monsoon (see below), Hales was promoted once again in 1975 to be a national lead severe weather forecaster at the NSSFC in Kansas City, MO. He excelled in this prestigious position for the next 36 years, providing numerous critical life-saving forecasts in advance of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes across the U. S. He also continued his applied research efforts and offered wise counsel and guidance, resulting in improved severe weather products and services over several decades.^[3]

Hales was an SPC lead forecaster for a longer period than anyone in the history of an organization that began in 1952; he served in that position 36 years from 1975 until 2011. During that period, he issued numerous timely and accurate forecasts and watches for many historic American tornado and severe thunderstorm events. These include:

• March 29,1984 Carolinas tornado outbreak.
• March 12, 1993 Gulf of Mexico to East Coast "Super Storm", including Florida severe weather.
• March 27, 1994 "Palm Sunday II" southeast U.S. tornado outbreak
• May 4-10, 2003 Central-Eastern U.S. weeklong sequence of tornado outbreaks and "round-the-clock" severe storms.
• February 28-March 2, 2007 multi-day southern U.S. tornado outbreak, including the Enterprise, AL tornado on March 1, 2007.
• February 5-6, 2008 Tennessee and Ohio Valleys "Super Tuesday" tornado outbreak.
• May 25, 2008 Central U.S. severe weather outbreak including the "Parkersburg, IA" tornado.
• May 8, 2009 Southern Midwest "Super Derecho".

When he retired on July 2, 2011, Hales had issued 5,540 severe thunderstorm and tornado watches. This is over twice the number of severe weather watches issued by anyone else in the history of NSSFC/SPC, and is a testament to his lifetime of stellar public service to protect the American people from life-threatening extreme weather. This record is likely to never be broken.

Over the course of his long career, Hales was also a visionary for future products and services at the NSSFC/SPC; two examples follow. Historically, severe weather outlooks were issued for the current day only and this continued from 1952 through 1985. However, as numerical weather prediction models improved into the 1980s and extended the range of useful meteorological guidance, he was a strong advocate for issuing a severe weather outlook product starting two days in advance (the Day-Two Outlook); this product was instituted in 1986.^[2] Hales also strongly supported and helped design a new, short-term Mesoscale Convective Discussion (MCD) product that addressed severe thunderstorm potential over mesoscale (roughly 200-1000 sq km) areas in the next 2-6 hours. The MCD contained technical information on topics such as storm trends and potential watch issuance in the next several hours. This innovative product (also instituted in 1986^[2])helped bridge the time gap between longer-term outlook products and short-term watches from SPC.

Hales played a pivotal role in the understanding and prediction of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. In particular, his research in Arizona monsoonal thunderstorms ^[4][5] and Los Angeles Basin tornadoes^[6] were important early steps toward better forecasts of those phenomena.

His initial research while stationed in Phoenix was conducted on the meteorological setting of Arizona summer thunderstorms and the southwest U.S. monsoon. He was the first to demonstrate that the primary moisture source for desert southwest U.S. thunderstorms came from the Pacific Ocean via northward, low-level moisture surges from the Gulf of California.^[7] Prior to this seminal work, it was commonly accepted that moisture from the Gulf of Mexico or Pacific Ocean were key factors driving the southwest monsoon, but Hales’ careful and insightful collection and analysis of data showed the primary importance of the Gulf of California moisture.

Hales also provided early analysis of organized, westward moving, intense thunderstorm clusters across the Arizona desert. These storm systems have been called haboobs, chubascos, or Sonora storms. By blending data from satellite, radar, and surface observations, he detailed the structure and movement of one particularly damaging event in 1973, and provided new scientific understanding of these long-lived convective systems.^[8]

His early life growing up in the Los Angeles area fueled his interest in unusual weather in southern California. Living in Whittier, Hales would often be frustrated that storm systems would bring interesting weather to the mountains, but not where he was. He enjoyed studying heavy mountain snows and the occasional tornadoes that occurred during the cooler months of the year. His documentation of synoptic patterns and meteorological parameters associated with tornadoes in the Los Angeles Basin enabled improved prediction of tornado and waterspout threats over the region. In particular, he identified the role of orographic forcing on low-level wind field patterns that supported development of shallow supercells affecting the Los Angeles Basin^[6]

Hales has been involved in a variety of other research endeavors that greatly improved our understanding of extreme weather events and benefited operational severe storm forecasting, including the Kansas City flash flood of 12 September 1977^[9] and the "Palm Sunday II" tornado outbreak of 1994.^[10] He also developed the concept of “significant severe thunderstorms and tornadoes” to classify events with much greater societal impacts and damage potential (e.g., hail at least 2” diameter, wind gust at least 75 mph, and particularly intense tornadoes with damage rating at least EF2 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale).^[11] He was a key contributor to the annual NSSFC/SPC severe events technical report series, a predecessor of the current SPC events web-based archive. Hales also served as a mentor for students participating in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program at the National Weather Center in Norman.

Hales died on May 20, 2024, from bladder cancer.^[1]

Hales was recognized for his exemplary public service and received a number of honors for outstanding performance. These include:

• 1982 Silver Medal (Joint Organization Award) – "For exemplary service during the tornado outbreak of April 2-3, 1982"^[12]
• 1986 Charles L. Mitchell Award from the American Meteorological Society - "For exceptionally accurate and timely forecasts and warnings during the March 28-29, 1984, Carolina tornado outbreak resulting in a significant saving of lives in South Carolina.^[13]"
• 1993 Elected Fellow of American Meteorological Society^[14]
• 2001 Silver Medal (Joint Organization Award) – “For providing the citizens of Alabama life-saving tornado watch and warning information during the tornado outbreak of December 16, 2000.”^[15]
• 2004 Gold Medal (Joint Organization Award) – “For outstanding, life-saving performance during a record tornado outbreak from May 4-10, 2003.”^[16]
• 2008 Bronze Medal (Joint Organization Award) – “For outstanding fire weather forecast and briefing support to fire agencies fighting the catastrophic Southern California fires of October-November 2007.”
• 2009 Bronze Medal (Joint Organization Award) – “For providing proactive and life-saving service during the record-breaking February 5, 2008, “Super Tuesday” killer tornado outbreak.”
• 2011 NOAA Distinguished Career Award – “For a very productive and distinguished career of public service providing nationwide forecasts of severe convective storms and tornadoes.”
• 2011 National Weather Association Special Lifetime Achievement Award.^[17]
• 2014 University of Utah Department of Atmospheric Sciences Distinguished Alumni Award^[18]

• Storm Prediction Center
• Robert H. Johns
• Joseph G. Galway
• Larry Wilson (meteorologist)
• Robert C. Miller