David Arnett

1927 - 2022

Arnett Dennis

RAPID CITY – Arnett Dennis, 94, died Monday, May 9, 2022.

Arnett Stanley Dennis was born in a farmhouse in Arlington, Prince Edward Island, Canada in 1927. He was the seventh child of William and Ruth (Gorrill) Dennis. In 1931 the family moved to Port Hill, Prince Edward Island, where he began his formal education in the local one-room school. He graduated from Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in 1947, and from Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia in 1949. He later received M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in physics from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. He won several scholarships during his university career.

Arnett moved to California in 1955 and became an American citizen in 1961. In 1965 he moved to Rapid City, South Dakota, where he married the former Maralee (Hamm) Burton in 1968. They lived in Rapid City until 1981, where he accepted a job with the U.S. Government at the Denver Federal Center. Following his retirement in 1991, they returned to Rapid City to a new house, which they had designed to fit on a hillside lot in Fairway Hills. They lived there until they moved to Westhills Village in 2013.

While living in Canada, Arnett worked at various times as a farm hand, public school teacher, surveyor's assistant, laborer in a copper refinery, weather forecaster at Royal Canadian Air Force stations, and as a radar meteorologist for McGill University. His first position in the United States was a 1954 summer job at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. His principal employers in the United States were the Weather Modification Co. (WMC) of San Jose, California, Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, South Dakota School of Mines & Technology (SDSM&T) in Rapid City, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) at the Denver Federal Center. At WMC he was responsible for cloud seeding projects in California and several other states. At SRI, from 1960-1965, he led an early, theoretical study of the feasibility of observing rainfall from radar-equipped weather satellites, and also took part in classified (secret) research for U.S. Government agencies. He joined the SDSM&T as the associate director of its Institute of Atmospheric Sciences (IAS) in 1965. From 1974 to 1981 he was the director of the IAS and an ex officio member of the South Dakota Weather Modification Commission. His earliest work at the USBR also dealt with weather modification, but he later became involved in studies of the potential impacts of global warming on USBR water conservation projects in the western United States.

Dr. Dennis was a consultant to several agencies, including the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a United Nations agency headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1978, on behalf of the WMO, he traveled alone through four French-speaking countries in West Africa, collecting information on their attempts to alleviate droughts by cloud seeding.

Arnett was a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, a member and past president of the Weather Modification Association (WMA), which is an international group of about 100 scientists and other persons interested in cloud seeding applications, and a member of the Society of Sigma Xi / Research Society of America. His book Weather Modification by Cloud Seeding was published by Academic Press, New York in 1980 and in Russian translation in Moscow in 1983. He was the author of three published encyclopedia articles and numerous scientific papers and reports, some of which he presented at national and international conferences.

In addition to his work, Arnett took part in a variety of recreational activities. As a young man, he took flying lessons and obtained a pilot's license. After moving to Rapid City, he joined the local Elks Lodge, Toastmasters International, and the Arrowhead Country Club. In February of 1979 he journeyed with three other scientists to North Dakota to experience a total eclipse of the sun. He had a life-long interest in philately (stamp collecting), which was supported by reading books on history and geography, and by his membership in the American Philatelic Society. He appreciated the fact that his work involved travel to about 20 foreign countries, including Iran, China, and other former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), to meet with fellow scientists and other residents of these countries. Maralee accompanied him on business and vacation trips to Australia, Canada, and western Europe, and on his first visit to the U.S.S.R. in 1973, which included a tour of the historic city of Samarkand in central Asia.

In retirement Arnett was a consultant for local law firms, learned to play duplicate bridge, scored a hole-in-one at LaCroix Links, and wrote a family history. In 1994 he and Maralee joined the Canyon Lake Senior Center, where he served as a board member for over 10 years. He also joined the Herbert Weisz Philosophical Society and made several presentations to that group. Starting about 2007, he wrote a detailed account of the events leading up to the Rapid City flood of June 1972 and its aftermath, which was published on the SDSM&T and WMA websites in 2010. During this phase of his life, he often attended the First Congregational Church of Rapid City with Maralee.

Arnett was preceded in death by his parents, four brothers, and three sisters.

His survivors include wife Maralee; daughter, Peggy (Cris) Palmer; son, Rob (Julie) Burton, all of Rapid City; six grandchildren, six great grandchildren, and sister in law, Jeanette (Bob) Yahne, Three Rivers, CA. All of his other surviving, close relatives live in Canada. They include brother, Edgar and four sisters-in-law, Jenny, Rose-Marie, Julia, and Janet Dennis, and 18 nephews and nieces.

Services will be at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 21, 2022 at First Congregational Church with visitation one hour prior to services.

Arnett's online guestbook is available to sign at www.osheimschmidt.com.