RALPH SHAPIRO

SHAPIRO, Ralph Atmospheric Physicist and Inventor Ralph Shapiro, age 98 years, atmospheric physicist and inventor of the Shapiro Filter, died of natural causes at home in Dedham on December 4, 2020. Born in Malden, MA to Shifra Shapiro & Samuel Shapiro, Dr. Shapiro is survived by his brother Sidney Shapiro & his wife Jan Shapiro, his daughter Susan Olfson Shapiro & her husband Philip Parisi, his son Paul Shapiro & his wife Barbara Hoffman, his daughter Nancy Shapiro, granddaughters Emily Shapiro and Sarah Shapiro, nieces, nephews, and cousins. He was predeceased by his beloved wife of 50 years, Sylvia Olfson Shapiro, parents Shifra Shapiro & Samuel Shapiro, sister Dora Carron, and brother Morey Carron. After graduating from Boston Latin School in 1939, Dr. Shapiro earned his B.S. degree from Bridgewater State College in 1943. Making use of his training in physics and mathematics, Dr. Shapiro served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during World War II, providing weather and ocean forecasts for ships and planes. After the War, Dr. Shapiro married his college sweetheart, Sylvia. After Dr. Shapiro's discharge from active military service, the two of them returned to Boston, where Dr. Shapiro attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, obtaining his M.S. (1948) and Sc.D. (1950) degrees in meteorology. In his over 45 years of theoretical and applied research in atmospheric sciences, Dr. Shapiro authored or co-authored more than 90 articles, reports, and reviews in a variety of meteorological, geophysical, mathematical, and astronomical journals, more than 60 of which were peer-reviewed. These articles covered a wide range of interests from the effects of sunspots on the terrestrial atmosphere to the effects of periodic heat sources on the equatorial stratosphere. By far, Dr. Shapiro's most significant contribution was his creation and development of the "Shapiro Filter" in the early 1970s. By filtering out or damping the shortest wavelengths, while preserving the largest structures of a signal, this mathematical algorithm permitted the development of reliable weather forecasts, playing a critical role in present-day computer models' ability to accurately predict the weather further into the future. The Shapiro Filter, which has also been applied to such diverse fields as oceanography and computational aeroacoustics, is still actively used to this day, cited hundreds of times by researchers and scholars. Dr. Shapiro was a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, Scientific Research Society of America, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, physical attendance at the graveside service will be private but viewing of the service will be available by logging onto https://tinyurl.com/RalphShapiro on Monday, December 7, 2020 at 2pm. The link will also be available any time after the scheduled funeral time for viewing. Contributions are welcomed in Dr. Shapiro's memory to the American Heart Association, www.heart.org. Please share your thoughts about Ralph Shapiro at Levine Chapels, www.levinechapels.com Levine Chapels, Brookline 617-277-8300