Science: Man's Milieu

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Modern scientific meteorology was founded on the telegraph, with an assist from the Crimean War. On Nov. 14, 1854, a violent storm sank key vessels of a Franco-British fleet in Balaklava harbor. At the request of the French Minister of War, the famed Astronomer Urbain Le Verrier studied the storm and reported that it could have been tracked across Europe by the new-fangled telegraph. Soon after his report sank in, most of Europe (and later the U.S.) had a telegraphic storm-warning service.

For more than 50 years after Le Verrier, weather forecasting consisted principally of watching the cyclones as they drifted majestically, dragging the weather with them. Trouble was that the cyclones did not always behave. They were always ringed by counterclockwise winds, but the winds were sometimes gentle and sometimes violent. Sometimes the cyclones stood still, or even moved backward.

Fronts & Masses. About the time of World War I, Professor Vilhelm Bjerknes of Norway and his son Jacob decided that the fractious cyclones, though they may be 1,000 miles across, are only minor bit-players in the weather drama. The leading players are enormous masses of cold, dry air that sweep down from the polar regions at irregular intervals. The Bjerknes theory, emphasizing fronts and air masses rather than cyclones, lit up meteorology like a new sun rising, and upgraded it into a more exact science. It is still the basis of the familiar newspaper weather maps.

None of this made much impression on young Carl-Gustaf Rossby, who in 1918 was a restless, adventurous 19-year-old student at the University of Stockholm. Son of a construction engineer, he went through gymnasium (secondary school) with no special interest in science. Looking around for an exciting profession, he thought at one time of astronomy. This attraction, he now recalls, came from several romantic novels about bearded astronomers sitting on mountaintops and looking at the stars, while young girls in lacy nightgowns ran uphill toward them, tearing their nightgowns on the thickets. Calm reflection convinced him that real-life astronomy does not live up to this billing.

For one year he halfheartedly studied physics at the University of Stockholm, then transferred to the Geophysical Institute in Bergen. Bergen had something special to offer: the great Professor Bjerknes, whom Rossby remembers as "a man with a bushel of hair, a remote interest in his students and a frugal way with his family." Soon Rossby was living in the professor's house and planning to take his air-mass gospel to the ends of the earth.

Mission to Washington. Although young Rossby was fascinated by the new meteorology, he did not stay put in Bergen. Like many European students, he wandered from university to university, stopping for a year at Leipzig, then returning to Stockholm. After winning his licentiate (graduate degree) in theoretical physics, he worked for a while for the Swedish weather bureau, where he decided "the prospects looked pretty bleak." Rescue came in 1926 from the Sweden-American Foundation, which gave him a fellowship to go to the U.S. His mission: to sell the Bjerknes doctrine to U.S. meteorology.

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