André Robert

Who was André Robert?

Dr. André Robert was a Canadian meteorologist who pioneered the modelling the Earth's atmospheric circulation.

Born in New York, NY in 1928, Robert moved to Grand-Mère, Quebec in May 1937. He received his BSc from Laval University in 1952 and his MSc from University of Toronto in 1953. 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.

For his PhD, Robert worked at McGill University on the spectral model using spectral harmonics for the representation of atmospheric fields in global climate and numerical weather prediction models.

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 on the world adopted this algorithm for their models.

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.