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WILLIAM E. REIFSNYDER was born in Ridgway, Pennsylvania, but spent his early years in New York City. He attended Syracuse University and New York University, receiving a B.S. degree in Meteorology from the latter institution in 1944. Subsequently, he received a Master of Forestry degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1949 and a Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 1954. He joined the Yale faculty in 1955, taught courses in biometeorology, climatology, air pollution meteorology, and forest fire control, and held a joint appointment in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health in the School of Medicine. Currently, he is a Professor Emeritus of Forest Meteorology and Biometeorology at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Prior to joining the Yale faculty, Dr. Reifsnyder worked for the U.S. Forest Service in the California Forest and Range Experiment Station as a research forest fire meteorologist. He participated in the early atomic bomb tests, evaluating the effects of nuclear explosions on forests. At that time, he also wrote and narrated a series of programs on meteorology over Berkeley radio station KPFA. In Connecticut, he was an on-air weather forecaster for the local NBC TV station; and he later served as chairman of the National Research Council Committee on Climatology.
Dr. Reifsnyder has been a visiting professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Munich and at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, as well as a Visiting Lecturer in Biometeorology at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany. He has also served as Senior Research Scientist at the Environmental Research Laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. He is a corresponding member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering and has served as chairman of its Committee on Atmosphere. He has also served as vice-president of the International Society of Biometeorology and as the chairman of the committee on biometeorology and the committee on agricultural and forest meteorology of the American Meteorological Society, which conferred upon him its award for Outstanding Achievement in Bioclimatology.
Dr. Reifsnyder served for a number of years as the Editor-in-chief of the international journal Agricultural and Forest Meteorology; and he is the author of more than 100 articles that have been published in scholarly and scientific journals. Most recently, he edited the proceedings of an international workshop on meteorology and agroforestry, which was organized and published by the International Council on Research in Agroforestry headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. Reifsnyder is the author of Weathering the Wilderness, a book on weather and climate for outdoor recreationists. He has also written four outdoor books published by the Sierra Club and the Appalachian Mountain Club.
Dr. Reifsnyder has been active in a number of outdoor organizations, including serving on the national board of directors of American Youth Hostels and the North Country Board and Mid-Atlantic Board of the Appalachian Mountain Club. He additionally was chairman of the Connecticut Chapter of the Sierra Club and served the club in a number of capacities over the years.