Reading the Air and the Sea: Fourteen Weather, Ocean and Climate Scientists

Beaufort devised his wind force scale in 1805, relating wind speed to observed conditions at sea or on land. The Royal Navy officially adopted it, and it later spread internationally, making it the first stop because it gave sailors a shared language for weather.

FitzRoy commanded HMS Beagle on the survey voyage that carried Charles Darwin around the world, then turned to weather. He made daily predictions, coined the word forecast for them, and in 1854 founded what became the Meteorological Office to get weather information to sailors and fishermen.

In 1856 Foote ran experiments with sun-warmed gas cylinders that anticipated the greenhouse effect. Joseph Henry read her paper at the American Association for the Advancement of Science because she did not present it herself, and it was then forgotten for over 150 years until historians rediscovered it in the 2010s.

Koppen proposed his climate classification in 1884, and with modifications it is still widely used. He also coined the name aerology for the science of the upper atmosphere, so this stop turns from single storms to the sorting of whole climates.

Wondering what caused the ice ages, Arrhenius spent a year of hand calculation on how carbon dioxide sets the planet's temperature and published the first quantitative greenhouse effect in 1896. His estimate for doubled carbon dioxide sits near the modern range, though he guessed the change would take millennia rather than a century.

Fridtjof Nansen noticed during the Fram expedition that icebergs drift at an angle to the wind, and Vilhelm Bjerknes invited the young Ekman to investigate. In 1905 Ekman published the Ekman spiral, a balance between friction in the ocean and the Coriolis force from the Earth's rotation, and he also developed the Ekman current meter and water bottle.

The teacher who set Ekman on his path was a Norwegian geophysicist and meteorologist. Bjerknes formulated the primitive equations still used in numerical weather prediction and climate modelling, and he founded the Bergen School of Meteorology in the early twentieth century.

Milankovic calculated, decades before ice cores could confirm it, how small cyclical wobbles in Earth's orbit and tilt pace the ice ages. The Milankovitch cycles remain the accepted explanation for the glacial and interglacial swings of the Pleistocene, and they answer the question Arrhenius started from.

Rossby was the first to explain the large-scale motions of the atmosphere in terms of fluid mechanics. He identified and characterized the jet stream and the long atmospheric waves in the westerlies that now bear his name as Rossby waves.

Beginning in the 1940s Stommel advanced theories of global ocean circulation and of the behavior of the Gulf Stream that remain foundational to physical oceanography. He was both a groundbreaking theoretician and an astute seagoing observer.

Revelle was among the early scientists to study anthropogenic global warming, as well as the movement of Earth's tectonic plates. His stop joins the ocean work of the previous stops to the carbon dioxide question that Arrhenius raised.

Keeling recorded atmospheric carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory and documented steadily rising levels. This confirmed Arrhenius's 1896 proposition of a human contribution to the greenhouse effect, and the Keeling Curve is named for him.

Munk was one of the first scientists to bring statistical methods to the analysis of oceanographic data. His work ranged across surface waves, tides, internal waves, variations in Earth's rotation, acoustical measurement of ocean properties, sea level rise and climate change.

Hasselmann is a German oceanographer and climate modeller who led the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. He shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics with Syukuro Manabe and Giorgio Parisi, which brings the trail from a sailor's wind scale to recognized climate modelling.