As a young man, John was a reporter at the Wisconsin State Journal and planned a career in journalism. However, serendipity changed his life. In 1955, he was dispatched to report on a University of Wisconsin engineering professor experimenting with tethered airplane take-offs. His reporting sparked an interest in aviation, and he began working toward a private pilot’s license in April 1955. The ground school course for his license exposed him to meteorology, leading him to enroll in Meteorology 101 at the University of Wisconsin. The course was taught by Dr. Reid Bryson, whose introduction to meteorology so captivated John that he later became his Ph.D. advisor. John graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a B.S. in 1958 and a Ph.D. in 1964, both in Meteorology.
His interest in aviation and meteorology merged during his graduate school research. He flew a Cessna 310 across the Midwest conducting meteorological research and remained interested in aviation throughout his life. In his fifties, he regained currency on his pilot’s certificate and flew his personal plane for many years. He fondly recounted his opportunity to land a wide-body jet in a commercial flight simulator. He was invited into the cockpit for takeoff on the Concorde and later sat in the jump seat during an international flight landing in Alaska.
John served in Air Force ROTC during college and graduate school. After graduation he continued his meteorological research during three years of active-duty service. His academic career began in 1965 at Penn State’s Department of Meteorology and included several sabbatical visits to Denmark in the 1970s. He served as Head of the Department of Meteorology at Penn State from 1981 to early 1986. Over the course of his career, he contributed to the development of meteorological science and its practical application.
John was appointed Dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State in 1986, serving in that role until his retirement in 2002. He led the College through a period of rapid technological change, as personal computers, high-performance computing, and the internet reshaped scientific research and education. Having been an early adopter of computing in his own research, he worked to position the College to lead in an era defined by advanced computing and global connectivity.
[StateCollege.com. (2026, February 13). Dr. John Altnow Dutton. https://www.statecollege.com/obituaries/dr-john-altnow-dutton/]
A wonderful tribute to Dean Dutton can also be seen on Jon Nese's Weather Whys.
