J. Cecil Alter (31 March 1879 - 20 May 1964) was a professional meteorologist and amateur historian who distinguished himself in both fields. During his residence in Utah from 1902-1941, his energy and high scientific standards helped build both the Utah State Weather Service and the Utah State Historical Society into sound professional organizations, and his publications in both of his fields of interest made valuable contributions in Utah culture.

Alter was not a native Utahn. He was born in Rensselear, Indiana and no doubt inherited much of his aggressive curiosity from his father, John E. Alter, who was a farmer, civil engineer, surveyor, and school teacher. Although Alter eventually followed his father into all of those fields, his formal education was limited to spotty attendance at several colleges. A correspondence course from Columbia and avid reading on his own led him into meteorology. After preparing exhibits for both the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Weather Service at several international conferences, Alter was assigned to the Weather Bureau at Salt Lake City. He arrived here in 1902 and stayed until 1941, with brief interruptions when he was temporarily assigned to Weather Bureau offices in Medford, Oregon, and Cheyenne, Wyoming.

During his service with the Utah State Weather Service, Alter published widely in scientific journals and developed improved ways of reporting rain and snowfall which were later adopted nationwide. In 1941 he was transferred to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he spent the last eight years of his meteorological career. Upon his retirement in 1949, he moved to California.

It is not clear when Alter picked up his interest in history. It may have been forced upon him because of his travels and the necessity of making himself feel at home in strange environments. At any rate, the Utah environment, which must have been at least as strange as any he encountered elsewhere (he was a Midwesterner, a Christian Scientist, and a Mason), had clearly captured his interest very soon after he moved here. When he was appointed a member of the board of control of the Utah State Historical Society in 1928, he already had two books on Utah to his credit: (1925), and (1927). Alter was a well-known personality in Utah, both because of his colorful weather forecasting, but also because of a series of travel articles, "Tribune Travelogs," which had appeared in the during the 1920s. Some of those articles, which were written to capitalize upon the new interest in tourism and the good roads movement later found their way into .

While editor of the , Alter attempted to establish a regular publication schedule and to secure a level of funding from the State Legislature commensurate with the task. He established a tradition of ambitious publishing projects in the During his editorship, for example, he published the Dominguez-Escalante Journal, the Diary of Almon Harris Thompson, and three additional volumes devoted to the records of the John Wesley Powell explorations of the Colorado River in 1869 and 1871-1872.

Although Alter's interpretive skills would not place him in the first rank of Utah historians, several of his books are indispensable even after a half century. His biography of the mountain man James Bridger, for example, is still a standard work. Alter's skills as a historian, though, were more in the field of compiling reference works and publishing original docents. His is still one of the most frequently consulted Utah reference works. , which consists of one volume of chronologically arranged news articles from the and the comprising a sort of running narrative of raw material for Utah history, and two volumes of biographical sketches, is unevenly useful The first volume is rarely consulted, but the biographical sketches are invaluable, for they include many persons untreated elsewhere. Through the has worn less well than the others, largely because it was superseded in thoroughness and sophistication by the WPA in 1941, but it still contains lively writing and entertaining anecdotes and information that can enliven a trip almost anywhere from Yellowstone National Park to the Kaibab Plateau.

Alter's final gift to the Utah State Historical Society, made during his retirement years in California, was his personal library, one of the finest collections of Utah books and Western Americana ever to come to the Society. Financial pressures forced him to sell most of the books rather than donate them (though he also donated many of them), but his prices were usually only a fraction of the book's worth--often only two or three dollars. When he died in 1964, Utah had good reason to go into mourning, and his remains were returned to his adopted state.