Wiin-Nielsen's meteorological career began in 1952 at the University of Copenhagen as scientific assistant to Professor Ragnar Fjørtoft. He later moved to next took him to the Institute of Meteorology at Stockholm, which had been set up by Carl-Gustaf Rossby in 1947. Here he participated in the first numerical prediction that completed its computation ahead of the time for which the forecast was made.[2] In 1959 he moved to the US for fifteen years, beginning at the Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit, run by the U.S. Weather Bureau, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Navy. In 1961 he accepted an offer to work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, where his research focused on the general circulation of the atmosphere. Moving to the University of Michigan in 1963, he set up the meteorology department that later expanded to include oceanography and aeronomy, remaining there for ten years and building the department into a center for research in dynamical meteorology and the general circulation of the atmosphere.[3]
^Lablans, W.; Oerlemans, J. (December 2006), "A Buys Ballot Medal for Edward Lorenz. A Reflection on the History of the Prestigious Award and Evolving Attitudes toward Predictability", Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 87 (12): 1662–1666, Bibcode:2006BAMS...87.1662L, doi:10.1175/BAMS-87-12-1662.
