Berrien Moore III, Pioneering Scholar of Earth Science, Dies at 83

Berrien Moore III, who for decades spearheaded cutting-edge climate science at several universities and research institutes as well as at NASA, died on Dec. 17 in Norman, Okla. He was 83.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter, Leila A.C. Moore.

His contributions to science spanned the theoretical and the practical, giving birth to new fields of study in earth sciences. He strove to explain them to the general public through a nonprofit news organization and by testifying numerous times before Congress.

Berrien Moore III was born on Nov. 12, 1941, in Atlanta to Berrien Moore Jr., a golfer, and Mary (Large) Moore, who worked for Southern Bell and was a television host.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina in 1963 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Virginia in 1969, Dr. Moore joined the faculty at the University of New Hampshire. When he was a young professor specializing in applied mathematics, few if any of his academic peers had tried to apply mathematics to studying the earth’s natural systems. Colleagues at the time remember Dr. Moore bucking at the sensibilities of the field he was trained in.

Most researchers thought of their field as “localized” at the time, said Robert Corell, an oceanographer and engineer whose career had many parallels with Dr. Moore’s. Dr. Moore, he said, “really helped awaken us.”

Dr. Moore and his colleagues operated in an age of refrigerator-size supercomputers that were both few in number and highly coveted by scientists awed by their ability to process reams of data. Dr. Corell remembered Dr. Moore vying for time on one belonging to the University of New Hampshire with Jochen Heisenberg, the son of the nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg.