The Bergen School of Dynamic Meteorology and Its Dissemination
Overview
Meteorology as a modern science evolved after the beginning of the twentieth century, from nineteenth-century origins as a subdiscipline of geography, unsystematically defined by subjective rules of weather forecasting. Defining the motion and phenomena of the atmosphere by the mathematics of hydro- and thermodynamics and capable of being predicted by systematic methods of data analysis and forecasting was the groundwork of Norwegian theoretical physicist Vilhelm Bjerknes, assisted by his young colleagues in founding the Bergen School of meteorology.
Background
By the middle of the nineteenth century the study of meteorology, the motion and phenomena of the Earth's atmosphere, had progressed from isolated attempts at practical forecasting of the direction of weather patterns by unsystematic observational techniques and dependence on climatological data to focus on low pressure centers. Any mathematically grounded theory of atmospheric motion was limited to basic understanding of the general flow of the atmosphere on a rotating Earth, as in the work of American William Ferrel (1817-1891), followed by frictional considerations of Norwegian Henrik Mohn (1835-1916), and some others. Of fundamental importance to future atmospheric understanding was the contemporary hydrodynamic study of vortex or circular motion and its remarkable stability and conservation of its rotational flow, particularly worked out mathematically by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894).
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