- Erik Palmén
Erik Herbert Palmén (
August 31 ,1898 ,Vaasa, Finland -March 19 ,1985 ) was the most famous researcher ofmeteorology inFinland . He worked together withVilhelm Bjerknes with theory oncyclone s andweather front s and was intimately involved in explaining the dynamics of thejet stream inUniversity of Chicago in so called Chicago school of meteorology (started byCarl-Gustaf Rossby ). He was also respected for his analysis of data collected byradiosonde s; his preprocessed and quality checked datasets were widely used by other researchers. Palmen was a multisided researcher who published articles inmeteorology ,geophysics andoceanography . The 1969 book by Palmen andChester W. Newton , "Atmospheric Circulation Systems: Their Structure and Interpretation", is still used as lecture material in the universities around the world.Palmen was the director of
Finnish Institute of Marine Research , a professor inHelsinki University and a member of theFinnish Academy of Arts and Letters . His nickname by students, friends and colleagues was "Maestro" and he was well known for his passion for cigars and interest of effects of weather onagriculture .Palmen received the
Buys-Ballot Medaille ofRoyal Dutch Academy in 1964. Then, when enough computing power was available and the first steps ofnumerical weather prediction were taken, the value of work done by the Chicago School 10-20 years earlier was really appreciated.External links
* [http://geosci.uchicago.edu/about/history.shtml Chicago School]
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