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Period: to
contributors of meteorology
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Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
Wilson developed an updated expansion chamber that came to be called the "cloud chamber" and used it to show that water droplets would also form in pure air (with no dust) if it was cooled enough to attain a very high humidity. -
Auguste Piccard
Auguste Piccard was a Swiss physicist and aeronaut who explored both the heights of the atmosphere and the depths of the ocean.Following his work with stratospheric balloons, Auguste Piccard turned his interest to the exploration of the ocean depths. -
Fatin Gökmen
Fatin Gökmen was a Turkish mathematician and astronomer. From 1904 to 1910, he was professor of Astronomy and Mathematics at the University of Istanbul.The Imperial Meteorological Observatory had been established in 1868 but was destroyed in the uprising of March 1909. The new government formed after the uprising appointed Gökmen director of the Imperial Observatory and charged him with finding a location for a new building. He established the new Observatory, named Kandilli, in 1911. -
Alfred Wegener
Wegener received a doctorate in astronomy in 1904, but found that he was more interested in geophysics, meteorology and climatology.In addition to his meteorological work, Wegener originated a revolution in geophysics: the idea of continental drift. -
Hermann Potocnik
Hermann Potocnik was an Austrian astronautics pioneer. After serving in WWI, he graduated from the electrical engineering faculty of the Vienna Technology University. As part of his work in astronautics, he was the first to establish the scientific basis of the geostationary orbit. -
Ferdinand Bonnel
Ferdinand Bonnel, born in France near the border with Belgium, was a Jesuit priest and educator who worked in Sri Lanka. He founded St. Michael's College, which became known for its programs in meteorology and astronomy. Bonnel was the College director for more than 40 years. -
Peter Shaw
Peter Shaw was an Australian meteorologist whose career with the Bureau of Meteorology spanned 41 years, starting in 1951.Shaw was the meteorologist with the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE) trip of 1954 that briefly landed in the Vestfold Hills area on a scouting mission to determine possible locations for a future Antarctic research station. -
Vilhelm Bjerknes
Bjerknes founded the Geophysical Institute of Bergen, with the goal of improving the country's meteorological forecast service.Bjerknes made analyses of his synoptic weather maps, in which he integrated the available observations over large areas into complete meteorological patterns that included smaller scale features such as cold and warm fronts and their associated circulations. -
Robert Alexander Watson-Watt
Robert Watson-Watt was a Scottish physicist best known for the development of radar. He worked at the British Meteorological Office in 1917 on the radio detection of thunderstorms.Watson-Watt's work included consideration of the structure of the upper atmosphere and its effect on radio waves. -
Torahiko Terada
Torahiko Terada was a Japanese meteorologist and university professor. He established the Earth Sciences Department at Tokyo University, where he taught meteorology. -
Francis W. Aston
Francis Aston was a British chemist who invented the mass spectrometer.During the war years he studied the effects of atmospheric conditions on the fabrics and dopes used in airplanes, as part of the war effort.
He won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1922. -
Milutin Milanković
Milutin Milanković was a Serbian engineeer and mathematician who was intrigued by the ice ages and and the climatic changes that must have caused the advance and retreat of the glaciers.Milanković studied the interactions between solar radiation and the temperature of the Earth. His results were published in Paris in 1920 in a monograph entitled Théorie mathématique des phénomènes thermiques produits par la radiation solaire (Mathematical theory of thermal phenomena caused by solar radiation). -
Irving Langmuir
Irving Langmuir was an American physical chemist who spent much of his career with the General Electric (GE) corporation. He was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1932.Langmuir had a strong interest in meteorology, particularly in the area of cloud microphysics. -
Hugo Eckener
The Aeroarctic/Graf Zeppelin Arctic expedition took place in 1931 with Eckener in command. Eckener would later write of the voyage that "my expectations, in so far as they were surpassed, were realized when I saw that, respecting the Arctic in summer, no anxieties need be felt regarding meteorological disturbances. Temperatures in the upper air regions are such that fears that an ice cap can be formed on the ship can be avoided by proper navigation." -
V.U. Vise
V. U. Vize was a Russian meteorologist, oceanographer and polar explorer, and a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He participated in many Soviet Arctic expeditions, including the voyage of the icebreaker Sibiryakov in 1932. -
Erich Regener
Erich Regener was a German physicist and professor of physics at Berlin and Stuttgart.In 1934 he became the first scientist to directly measure the absorption of UV energy in the ozone layer. He was therefore an important precursor in studies of the ozone layer. He also studied cosmic rays in the stratosphere. -
Alexander Logie du Toit
Alexander Du Toit was a South African geologist who was one of the strongest early supporters of Wegener's theory of continental drift. Like Wegener, du Toit realized that historical climate change could be explained if the continents had drifted from one climatic zone to another; that a rearrangement of the Earth's continents and oceans could act to change climate patterns. In his 1937 work Our Wandering Continents,A Hypothesis of Continental Drifting, du Toit expressed these climate ideas. -
Willard F. Libby
Willard Libby was an American chemist who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1960 for his development of a technique using radiocarbon for age determination in archaeology and the Earth sciences. He did not work directly on meteorological problems, but the 14C dating technique has since been used by many scientists conducting palaeoclimatological and palaeoenvironmental studies. -
Robin Page
Robin Page is a British author and television presenter. He is the author of Weather Forecasting: the Country Way. Published in 1977, it is a popular book of meteorological history, science, legend and folklore. -
Denis Hayes
Denis Hayes is an American environmental activist. In 1970, when just in his mid-20s, he became the national coordinator of the very first Earth Day. He is now the emeritus chair of the International Earth Day Network. Climate change, threats to the hydrological cycle, acidification of the world's oceans and energy are some of the issues with which Hayes has grappled. He is currently focusing on the politics of the debate on global warming and climate change in the U.S.
