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Apr 1, 1000
Ptolemy
Ptolemy was a Greek mathematician, geographer, astronomer and astrologer. In his work Phases of the Fixed Stars and Collection of Weather Signs, he described techniques to forecast the weather according to astronomical events. This work was clearly part of the Greek tradition of astrometeorological calendars relating astronomical phenomena to the weather. It introduced some innovations to the tradition, however. For example, it emphasized first and second magnitude stars rather than the constell -
Apr 6, 1193
Magnus, St. Albertus
St. Albertus Magnus was a Dominican scientist and philosopher. He has been called the "Doctor Universalis" in recognition of his vast learning. His writings on the natural sciences include physics, meteorology, geology, physiology, and plant and animal life. He was one of the primary transmitters of Greek philosophy, and in particular commented on and taught the texts of Aristotle in Paris through the translations of Averroes. -
Apr 6, 1215
Kublai Khan
Kublai Khan was a Mongol leader who according to Marco Polo maintained some 5000 court astrologers, whose duties included the hazardous task of weather prediction. Why so many? Guessing wrong, he explained, could lead to "early retirement". -
Apr 6, 1225
St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Thomas Aquinas was a philosopher and theologian from the Kingdom of Naples. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas wrote about the diabolical origin of storms: "Rains and winds, and whatsoever occurs by local impulse alone, can be caused by demon It is a dogma of faith that the demons can produce wind, storms, and a rain of fire from heaven". Aquinas also wrote that bells, "provided they have been duly consecrated and baptised, are the foremost means of frustrating the atmospheric mischiefs of the -
Gabriel Fahrenheit
He created the fahrenhiet scale the United States uses today. he also became a member of the Royal Society in 1724. -
John Dalton
He was most famous for his scientific opinion that all matter is actually made up of small particles. He also kept track of 200,000 different observations. -
William Ferrel
He made some ajustments to hadleys work. -
Christoph Hendrik Diederik Buys Ballot
The determination of the direction that air flowed within large weather systems is one of the main accomplishments of his. He also founded the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute and acted as its chief director right up until he died. -
William Morris Davis
He was often called the "Father of American Goegraphy", and he was a physical geography at Harvard. He founded the Association of American Geographers in 1904. -
Alfred Wegener.
He was most famous for his theory of continental drift. -
Robert Goddard
Robert Goddard was an American physicist, engineer and rocketry pioneer whose work created the foundations of space flight. He is now considered to be the "father" of modern rocketry. In 1919 he published his classic work, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, in which he showed that rockets could be used to explore the upper atmosphere, and that an object that would attain an "escape velocity" of about 11.2 km/sec could actually escape the Earth's gravity completely and head into space. -
Alexander Fridman
Alexander Fridman was a Russian meteorologist. In February 1913 he was appointed to a position in the Aerological Observatory in Pavlovsk (a suburb of St. Petersburg), where he studied meteorology and made aerological observations. In 1914 he studied dynamic meteorology under the Norwegian Vilhelm Bjerknes, the leading theoretical meteorologist of the time. After 1914, Fridman took part in several flights in airships to make weather observations. Thereafter he continued to work in various scient -
Edwin Armstrong
Edwin Armstrong was an American electrical engineer and inventor. Radio in the early 1920s operated on the AM (amplitude modulation) principle, in which the sound patterns were defined by varying (modulating) the amplitude (which is related to the power) of the carrier wave, at a fixed frequency. -
Pavel Molchanov
Pavel Molchanov was a Soviet meteorologist who worked at the Main Geophysical Observatory in Pavlovsk from 1917 to 1939. He was interested in applying aerological data (upper air data, measured in the atmosphere above the surface) to weather forecasting. -
Wiley Post
Wiley Post was an American aviation pioneer. In 1931 he and navigator Harold Gatty flew around the world in eight days, 15 hours and 51 minutes (the first round-the-world flight in 1924 had taken 175 days!). In 1933 Post became the first man to fly solo around the world (and did it in just less than 8 days). During both circumnavigations, he took advantage of strong westerly tailwinds that he found were sometimes present at the higher altitudes at which he flew. -
Bill Giles
Bill Giles is a well known British television weather broadcaster. He presented the weather on BBC Television for over 25 years. In 1983 he became the senior forecaster and leader of the Met Office broadcast meteorologist team, a position he held until retiring in January 2000. Since then, he has advised clients on questions related to broadcast meteorology. -
Jim Bacon
Jim Bacon is a British meteorological broadcaster. He joined the Met Office in 1968 and took the BSc course in meteorology at Reading University from 1974 to 1978. He was then posted to the London Weather Centre where he joined the BBC forecast team under Jack Scott. Bacon was also the weatherman on 'The Travel Show' on BBC 2 during its early years. -
Mario Molina
Mario Molina is a Mexican-born physicist who shared with F. Sherwood Rowland and Paul J. Crutzen in 1995 the Nobel Prize in physics for their research on ozone. Molina and Rowland together published in 1974 a seminal article in Nature in which they discussed the threat posed to the ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbon gases (CFCs) and by the freons used in aerosol spray cans, refrigeration fluids and plastic foams. -
Albert Gore
Al Gore was the 45th Vice-president of the U.S. He narrowly missed becoming President in 2000. He has been interested in environmental issues since his university days, and since 2000 has devoted most of his time to environmental activism. Gore's interest in global warming and other environmental issues was sparked by Roger Revelle, with whom he took a class during his studies at Harvard. Gore won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976. -
Helen Young
Helen Young is a British weather broadcaster. She joined the Meteorological Office in 1990 and worked in the Commercial Services Division as a consultant providing climatological data for the building and transport industries. She then moved to the Bristol Weather Centre where she began her broadcasting career as a regional weather presenter for BBC West. Then in 1993 she was transferred to the BBC Weather Centre in London. She became the team's Deputy Manager in 1998, Broadcast Manager in 2000, -
Dr. Rajesh Koothrappali
I am not sure about the date but i love this character on the Big Bang Theory! I do not mean this as one of the contributors to meteorology, but since this is kind of what he does i thought I would add it.
