A pioneering life in the clouds: Book review of James Rodger Fleming: First woman: Joanne Simpson and the tropical atmosphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 224 pp, £25.00 HB

James Rodger Fleming is the leading historian of modern meteorology and the climate sciences, with his many major works having forged and advanced the field. To his already important works, which cover some of the major figures of twentieth-century meteorology—including Guy Stewart Callendar, Vilhelm Bjerknes, Carl-Gustaf Rossby, Harry Wexler, and others—and issues like weather modification, he now adds this highly readable and informative biography of a pioneer of tropical meteorology and a pioneering woman in science: the American meteorologist Joanne Simpson, the first American woman to obtain a Ph.D. in meteorology and someone who made fundamental contributions to the science.