Anne Louise Beck

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Anne Louise Beck (married Anne Beck Walker , born March 18, 1896 , † November 29, 1982 in Fresno , California ) was an American meteorologist .

biography

Beck had Danish ancestry and grew up in Berkeley , California . She studied at the University of California, Berkeley , where she received her bachelor's degree with honors in 1918 . In her master's degree, she specialized in meteorology, climatology , astronomy, navigation and mathematics. In addition to his studies, Beck worked as an assistant at the astronomical institute of the university and in the summer of 1919 in the branch of the US Weather Bureau in San Francisco . She also taught mathematics at a high school in Lodi for a year in 1919/20 .

During her master's degree, Beck was selected in August 1920 for a $ 1,000 scholarship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation to study meteorology and oceanography for a year with Vilhelm Bjerknes and Bjørn Helland-Hansen in Bergen , Norway . She was the first person to receive a grant from the foundation in the field of meteorology and oceanography. Beck left New York on August 27, 1920 with the Bergensfjord in the direction of Bergen and returned to the USA on June 6, 1921. In addition to lectures and practical exercises in the field of oceanography, she was familiarized with the methods of the Bergen School of Meteorology , which Vilhelm Bjerknes and his group had founded. Beck assisted Bjerknes in writing his 1921 article On the Dynamics of the Circular Vortex with Applications to the Atmosphere and Atmospheric Vortex and Wave Motions .

Upon her return to the United States, the director of the US Weather Bureau, Charles Marvin , offered her a position at the Weather Bureau in Washington, DC, which she declined due to the distance to her home country California. With the work An Application of the Principles of Bjerknes' Dynamic Meteorology in a Study of Synoptic Weather Maps for the United States , she graduated in 1922 with a Master of Arts in Berkeley. In her master's thesis, Beck took up the meteorological work in Bergen and applied the polar front theory of the Bergen School to the weather in the United States. Her analysis of weather maps of the USA, which she had drawn for every day in January 1921 using the methods of the Bergen School, she submitted in 1921 for assessment to the monthly Weather Review . In addition to Beck's article, this only published one map, which the editor Alfred J. Henry had also edited heavily. A detailed discussion of the low pressure areas over the United States was also not reprinted.

After graduation, Anne Louise Beck taught astronomy, mathematics and geography, initially at high school, and from 1929 at Junior College in Santa Rosa , California. She also gave art classes. In 1928 Beck was accepted into the American Meteorological Society . From 1938 she taught meteorology and “theory of aviation” at a flight school of the Civil Aeronautics Authority in Santa Rosa. During the Second World War , she left college in 1941 and worked from then on at the Cal-Aero Flight Academy in Ontario, California for the Air Forces . There she also gave courses in meteorology.

Her further life is not known. There is a death entry in Fresno under her married name Anne Beck Walker , dated November 29, 1982.

Effect and reception

According to science historian James Fleming, Anne Louise Beck was one of the first women to make a “significant intellectual contribution” to meteorology. It was only 27 years after completing her master's degree that Joanne Malkus Simpson was the first woman to do her doctorate in the field of meteorology.

Along with LeRoy Meisinger , who published it in the Monthly Weather Review in 1920, Beck was one of the first young scientists to apply the polar front theory of the Bergen School to the weather in the USA. However, their efforts failed mainly because of the resistance of the US Weather Bureau. It was only after Carl-Gustaf Rossby's arrival in the United States in 1926 and a change in the head of the Weather Bureau that the techniques of the Bergen School slowly began to establish themselves in America. The heavy edits to Beck's article in the Monthly Weather Review are therefore, according to Fleming, also due to "institutional and national pride, age discrimination and probably sexism".

Beck's biography and her role in the history of meteorology did not become known until 2016 through the book Inventing Atmospheric Science , written by James Fleming , which “earned her late recognition”. Fleming himself draws parallels to Rossby's career in his book and comes to the conclusion that the “gender-specific expectations of the time” shaped Beck's career and at the same time “severely restricted” it.

Publications

literature

  • James Rodger Fleming: Inventing Atmospheric Science. Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology . MIT Press, Cambridge 2016, ISBN 978-0-262-03394-7 , pp. 52-57 ( academia.edu ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c A. H. Palmer: Fellowship in Meteorology . In: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society . tape 1 , no. 9 , 1920, p. 95-96 , JSTOR : 26261157 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i James Rodger Fleming: Inventing Atmospheric Science. Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology , pp. 52-57.
  3. ^ Charles F. Brooks: The Annual Meeting, Dec. 29, 1928 . In: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society . tape 10 , no. 1 , 1929, p. 16 ( ametsoc.org [PDF]).
  4. ↑ David M. Schultz et al .: Extratropical Cyclones: A Century of Research on Meteorology's Centerpiece. In: Meteorological Monographs. 59, 2018, p. 16.2, doi : 10.1175 / AMSMONOGRAPHS-D-18-0015.1 .
  5. ↑ Manuel Kaiser: Review of: Fleming, James Rodger: Inventing Atmospheric Science. Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology. In: H-Soz-Kult , January 9, 2017, accessed on March 18, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Beck, Anne Louise
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beck Walker, Anne
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American meteorologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1896
DATE OF DEATH November 29, 1982
Place of death Fresno