The Keeling Curve
The systematic measurement of atmospheric CO2 was one of the many data gathering efforts begun during the IGY and it has continued to the present time. The Weather Bureau's Harry Wexler 1911-62 , who led the atmospheric science efforts for the United States, obtained funding to install an infrared gas analyzer to make continuous readings of CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the Big Island of Hawaii. The observatory was chosen because of its location in the middle of the Pacific, far removed...
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Jacob Bjerknes and Halvor Solberg publish their paper Meteorological Conditions for the Formation of Rain an extension of Bjerknes's work on cyclones The Japanese meteorologist Sakuhei Fujiwara proposes that forecasters calculate vorticity by using a weather map and a celluloid scale for the gradient wind The British meteorologist Gilbert T. Walker notes a correlation between unusual surface pressure values across the entire South Pacific Ocean and names this phenomenon the Southern Oscillation...
Further Reading Sva
Bryson, Reid A., and Thomas J. Murray. Climates of Hunger. Madison University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. Bryson and Murray provide a fascinating, nontechnical review of how climate has changed over time, and how climate change affects civilizations. Charney, J. G., P. H. Stone, and W. J. Quirk. Drought in the Sahara A Biogeophysical Feedback Mechanism. Science 187 1975 435-436. This article discusses the factors that contribute to desertification. Emanuel, Kerry A. The Dependence of Hurricane...
Shortcuts to Prediction
Efforts to develop calculating aids to convert between different temperature scales, correct barometer readings, and compute atmospheric variables that could not be measured directly had started in the 19th century. By the beginning of the 20th century, calculating aids were being used to compute wind values from pressure data and rates of pressure change from temperature and pressure, and to make specialized calculations better solved with graphs. Stations reported temperatures in Celsius,...
The Cold War and Research Funding
In many ways, the 1950s was a period of financial retrenchment for much of science. European nations, still rebuilding after the war's devastation, had little in the way of spare funds for scientific research. Fiscal restraint was also a feature of the Eisenhower administration in the United States. While the Weather Bureau was trying to prepare for the introduction of numerical weather prediction techniques, which would require the acquisition of a computer and related peripheral equipment,...
The Bergen School
In 1917, after three years of war, living conditions were deteriorating throughout Europe. Vilhelm Bjerknes, director of the Leipzig Geophysical Institute since 1913, had lost most of his assistants to the German military and many of them had died. He had imported several Norwegians to help, including Jacob, his 19-year-old son, but he was struggling to keep up with his research tying upper-air data and aeronautical activities with a more rational, scientific basis for meteorology. Bjerknes...
Scientist of the Decade Jacob Bjerknes
The Norwegian meteorologist Jacob Aall Bonnevie Bjerknes was born November 2, 1897, to modern meteorology's founder, Vilhelm Bjerknes, and Honoria Sophia Bonnevie in Stockholm, Sweden, where his father was a physics professor. Young Jacob was surrounded by an academic family his aunt Kristine Bonnevie 1872-1948 was a zoologist and the first female professor in Norway. Moving with his family to Christiania later Oslo , where his father had been offered a professorship, Jacob remained in Norway...
A New Look at the Energy Budget
By the end of the 1950s, weather modification had evolved from being a matter of changes in local weather clearing fog, preventing frost on tender young fruit, reducing hail damage, generating rain to massive plans for climate control. One of the more grandiose schemes proposed by Russian scientists was to eliminate the Arctic ice cap in an attempt to warm up the northern and very cold regions of their country to improve their habitability. While the proposal itself may have been rather...
Scientist of the Decade Jule Gregory Charney
The mathematician-turned-meteorologist Jule Charney was born in San Francisco, California, to Stella and Ely Charney both Russian migr s. Raised in Los Angeles, he was attracted to mathematics by the time he was in high school and had familiarized himself with the basics of differential and integral calculus before enrolling in the University of California, Los Angeles. Graduating from UCLA in 1938 with an A.B. with honors in both mathematics and physics, he turned his sights on graduate...
Scientist of the Decade Edward N Lorenz
Often referred to as the father of chaos theory, the meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz was born and raised in West Hartford, Connecticut. Fascinated by numbers at a young age, Lorenz experienced his first spark of scientific interest during an encounter with an astronomical atlas when he was seven years old. When a total eclipse of the Sun occurred the next summer, he was hooked. As are most people interested in astronomy, Lorenz was interested in the weather, since the condition of the night sky...
Cyclic Weather
Despite the Bergen School's influence on meteorological practice, some scholars persisted in their pursuit of elusive weather cycles. Weather cycles recurring patterns of temperature, rainfall, or pressure have been sought since ancient times, primarily as a way of predicting the weather months, if not years, in advance. The peak in studies of these periodicities occurred in the 1920s research rapidly dropped off in the 1930s as new calculation techniques cast doubt on cycles. Most work on...
Creating the Polar Front
With the 1919 summer forecasting season successfully concluded, the Norwegian government authorized Vilhelm Bjerknes and his assistants to issue storm warnings for the west coast during the fall and winter. The Bergen School members would be able to track and analyze the more intense fall and winter cyclones. They could also expand their research into cyclone structure. The decision by many European nations to take up to four observations daily in support of aviation also provided extra data...
Scientist of the Decade Tor Bergeron
The Swedish meteorologist Tor Bergeron was born in England but returned to Sweden with his family at a young age and completed his education there. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1916, he joined the Swedish Weather Service as a meteorologist. Bergeron spent much of 1919 helping Vilhelm and Jacob Bjerknes establish their new forecasting program in Bergen. Jacob Bjerknes had introduced his now-famous cyclone model in 1918, but the complete model including the life cycle of the cyclone...
Climates Classified
A location's climate is generally described by the long-term average of temperature and precipitation. The word itself is derived from the Greek klima, which means slope. The well-traveled Greeks were aware that the countries lining the northern Mediterranean coast were warm and relatively moist compared to the dry desert regions east and south of the Mediterranean, and that countries in what we now call northern Europe were much colder. Trying to make sense out of these differences, they...
Further Reading Qly
Ashford, Oliver M. Prophet or Professor The Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson. Bristol, England, and Boston A. Hilger, 1985. This biography of Richardson describes his departure from meteorology and concentration on peace studies in his later years. Bjerknes, J., and Halvor Solberg. Life Cycle of Cyclones and the Polar Front Theory of Atmospheric Circulation. Geofysiske publikasjoner 3 1 1922 1-8. This paper explains how cyclones develop, mature, and die. Bjerknes, J. Atmospheric...
Statistical Meteorology
Numerical weather prediction was not the only forecasting technique to face opposition in the 1950s. Meteorologists who advocated the use of statistics as a prediction tool also confronted significant opposition from their synoptic meteorology colleagues. The synopticians those meteorologists who met the daily challenge of preparing weather forecasts viewed statistical methods with virtually the same disdain with which they had viewed the dynamic meteorology of Vilhelm Bjerknes some 50 years...
Keeping Planes in the Air
Commercial aviation expanded at a much faster rate than national weather services were equipped to support it during the 1920s. The rapid acceptance of air mass and frontal analysis throughout Europe attests to the desire to provide better flight forecasts for passenger and airmail flights. Upper-air data collection by means of pilot balloons, balloon-sondes, and aircraft assisted in this effort. Weather services in the United States remained at a disadvantage compared to those in European...
Why Frost
The German meteorologist Alfred Lothar Wegener 1880-1930 , best known for his theory of continental drift, had a wide variety of geophysical interests. Fascinated by Greenland, he made several expeditions to this frozen wasteland before his tragic death during a blizzard. Capitalizing on Greenland's ample opportunities to observe meteorological phenomena under freezing conditions, Wegener studied the formation of hoarfrost the interlocking crystals formed by direct deposition of water vapor...
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devoted to training new meteorologists. All military officers entering the one-year accelerated graduate training program had to have degrees, or almost-completed degrees, in physics or mathematics. Those who had other majors were accepted as long as they had a significant background in mathematics and physics. After a year of nonstop study, graduates were shipped out to air stations and military bases around the world to provide aviation forecasts, forecasts for ships at sea, and specialized...
Climate The Koppen Scheme
Wladimir Koppen's climate classification scheme, in various stages of development from its beginning in 1884, arrived at its ultimate form during the 1930s with the writing and publication of the five-volume Handbuch der Klimatologie Handbook of climatology . Edited by Koppen with his colleague Rudolph Geiger, these volumes presented the results of the latest climatological studies from around the world. They also presented the final version of Koppen's personal classification scheme. Climate...
The General Circulation of the Atmosphere
Wind patterns the physical manifestation of the general circulation of the atmosphere have been known since people starting sailing long distances across the oceans. Some, such as the Viking Erik the Red, found out about persistent westerly winds the hard way during failed attempts to sail from Iceland to Greenland. Others, such as Christopher Columbus, found that easterly winds would carry them across the Atlantic if they sailed down the west coast of Africa before trying to head west. By the...
A Virtual Atmosphere and Real Weather
Progress in numerical weather prediction continued throughout this decade. By 1952, Jule Charney and his Meteorology Project team had reached the point where it was time to talk about going operational. In all scientific research projects there is a time when the technique under development needs to leave the controlled world of the laboratory, where scientists have virtually unlimited time to analyze and perfect data, adjust their methodology, and consult other scientists. A new methodology...