Henry Helm Clayton

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Henry Helm Clayton (born March 12, 1861 in Murfreesboro , Tennessee , †  October 26, 1946 in Canton , Massachusetts ) was an American meteorologist .

Life and achievement

Clayton was born the son of physician Henry H. Clayton (1826–1888). Because of his weak constitution, he did not attend a public school but was taught in his parents' house. In 1878 he began the first investigations into local storms . After helping to set up the weather service in Tennessee in 1882, he was an assistant at the University of Michigan Observatory from 1884 to 1885 . During this time he was an associate editor of the American Meteorological Journal . After three months at Harvard College Observatory , Abbott Lawrence Rotch brought him to work as an assistant at his privately funded Blue Hill Observatory in Milton , Massachusetts . There Clayton first carried out extensive cloud and wind observations, which among other things led to the discovery of the Egnell-Clayton law .

In 1894 he invited the kite pioneer William Abner Eddy (1850-1909) to the Blue Hill Observatory. On August 4, 1894, they succeeded in moving a thermograph with a team of five Eddy kites to a height of 436 meters. Through this pioneering work and the perfection of the weather kite in the following years, Clayton established an efficient method for studying the higher layers of the atmosphere, which was used at many aerological observatories around the world until the 1940s . Clayton also holds the world record for a single kite, which is still valid today. On February 28, 1898, he brought a Hargrave box kite , which he had further developed , with a sail area of ​​eight square meters to a height of 3801 meters. In 1905 he led the Rotch and Léon-Philippe Teisserenc de Bort expedition to study the atmospheric conditions in the trade winds in the North Atlantic with the help of weather kites and balloons. He covered a distance of over 19,000 kilometers.

Clayton endeavored to use the results of his meteorological research to improve weather forecasting . In particular, he was looking for a way to make reliable long-term forecasts based on periodically recurring weather conditions. As early as 1886, he signaled short-term local weather forecasts by hoisting flags at the observatory, which can be seen from afar due to its exposed location on Great Blue Hill. Clayton campaigned for the national weather service, which was under the American army, to be incorporated into a civilian authority. This led to the formation of the United States Weather Bureau at the Department of Agriculture in 1891 . Clayton worked there from 1891 to 1893. He then returned to the Blue Hill Observatory, where he stayed until 1909. In 1896/97 he published weekly weather forecasts in the Blue Hill Weather Bulletin . From 1913 to 1922 Clayton worked for the Argentine Meteorological Service. During this time he began to deal intensively with the influence of solar activity on the weather. Upon his return, he set up a private weather service in Canton, Massachusetts, and advised private companies. In addition, he continued his research. In close collaboration with Charles Greeley Abbot , director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory , he tried to find correlations between the fluctuations in the solar constant and the weather, which ultimately failed. It was not until 40 years later that satellite observations revealed that the fluctuations in the solar constant found by Abbot were based on measurement errors . One fruit of Clayton's collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution was the World Weather Records , which he published , a compilation of meteorological data collected around the world.

Clayton was a founding member of the American Meteorological Society , a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1893), and long-time President of the Boston Scientific Society .

In 1907 he took part in the German balloon Pommern in the Gordon Bennett race in Saint Louis , although he had never done a balloon flight before. Together with the pilot Oskar Erbslöh , he won the trophy after a 40-hour journey that took the balloon to Asbury Park in New Jersey , 1,400 kilometers away .

Clayton married Frances Fawn Comyn in 1892. The couple had three children: Henry Comyn, Lawrence Locke, and Frances Lindley.

Fonts (selection)

  • Henry H. Clayton and Sterling P. Fergusson: Measurements of cloud heights and velocities . John Wilson and Son, Cambridge 1892
  • Sterling P. Fergusson and Henry H. Clayton: Exploration of the air by means of kites . John Wilson and Son, Cambridge 1897
  • Henry H. Clayton: Variation in Solar Radiation and the Weather . Smithsonian Inst., Washington 1920
  • Henry H. Clayton: World Weather . Macmillan, New York 1923
  • Henry H. Clayton: The bearing of polar meteorology on world weather . In: WLG Joerg (ed.): Problems of polar research (= Am. Geogr. Soc. Special Publ. No. 7), New York 1928, pp. 27-37
  • Henry H. Clayton: The sunspot period . Smithsonian Inst., Washington 1939
  • Henry H. Clayton: Solar relations to weather and life . The Clayton weather service, Canton, Massachusetts, 1943

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dragon World Records ( Memento from April 25, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ HH Clayton: A Plea for Civilian Control of the US Weather Bureau . In: Science . Volume 9, No. 209, 1887, pp. 113-114
  3. ^ WLG Joerg (ed.): Problems of polar research , New York 1928, p. 26
  4. ↑ To the Gordon Bennett Competition . In: Wiener Luftschiffer-Zeitung . Volume 6, No. 12, 1907, pp. 257-258
  5. ^ Henry Helm Clayton in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved January 9, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Clayton, Henry Helm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American meteorologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Murfreesboro , Tennessee
DATE OF DEATH October 26, 1946
Place of death Canton , Massachusetts