A Historical Perspective on Numerical Weather Prediction: A 1987 Interview with André Robert

In view of André Robert's outstanding scientific contributions, he was selected for a personal interview as part of the Oral History Project of the Canadian Meteorological Service. The interview covered a variety of topics including André's education, early career, the beginnings of numerical weather prediction (NWP) in Canada, the evolution of NWP models at the Canadian Meteorological Centre, André's general research methodology and his views on the impact and future of NWP. These phases are illustrated by many personal glimpses and anecdotes such as puzzles that his relatives challenged him with in his youth, his explanation of why “a lot of time in my life was spent trying to avoid reading literature”, and his expectation that “one day we are going to see forecasts of such a high quality that these will be even more accurate than the observations”. In addition to capturing André's characteristically clear and unconventional insights, the contents also provide a very informative complement to the more technical details of his contributions by setting the historical perspective in which they occurred. The interview was conducted in November 1987, when André was on the point of retiring from the Atmospheric Environment Service and becoming a professor in the Physics Department at l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Some minor editing and updating have been done, but changes have been minimized to avoid interfering with André's typically expressive style.