James Martin Stagg

Group Captain James Martin Stagg, (30 June 1900 - 23 June 1975) was a British Royal Air Force meteorologist who notably persuaded General Dwight D. Eisenhower to change the date of the Allied invasion of Europe in World War II, from June 5 to June 6, 1944. Stagg was the senior staff meteorologist working with input from three separate forecasting teams from the Royal Navy, Met Office and USAAF. The detailed history of the forecasts is subject to disagreement in the accounts published by participants, including Stagg himself [James R. Fleming, "Sverre Petterssen, the Bergen School, and the Forecasts for D-Day", in History of Meteorology, volume 1 (2004), International Commission on History of Meteorology (ICHM) accessed at [http://www.meteohistory.org/2004proceedings1.1/pdfs/08fleming.pdf] August 7, 2006 citing
* J. M. Stagg, "Forecast for Overlord", Ian Allen (1971), ISBN 0-7110-0251-7, and
* Sverre Petterssen, "Weathering the Storm: Sverre Petterssen, the D-Day Forecast, and the Rise of Modern Meteorology", American Meteorological Society (2001), ISBN 1-878220-33-0] .

Stagg later worked as director of services at the Meteorological Office until 1960.

He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1951, knighted in 1954, and elected as president of the Royal Meteorological Society in 1959.

ee also

* Military meteorology
* Sverre Petterssen

Notes

Further reading

* "D-Day:The role of the Met. Office", 1995, accessed at the Imperial War Museum, London [http://london.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/4/dday/pdfs/DDayWeather.pdf] August 3, 2006
* "Analysing and forecasting the weather of early June 1944", European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, July 7, 2004 accessed at [http://www.ecmwf.int/research/era/dday/] August 3, 2006
* Remarks by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to the American Meteorological Society, October 23, 2001 accessed at [http://www.supremecourtus.gov/publicinfo/speeches/sp_10-23-01.html] August 3, 2006 - Rehnquist served as a USAAF weather observer in World War II.
* Herschel Slater, "Weather forecast helped commander make D-Day decision", Chapel Hill News, North Carolina State University, June 1, 2004 accessed at [http://www.ncsu.edu/news/dailyclips/0604/060204.htm] August 3, 2006