Horace Byers

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Horace Byers (right) with two colleagues from the Thunderstorm Project , Ferguson Hall and Lewis Meng

Horace Robert Byers (born March 12, 1906 in Seattle , Washington , † May 22, 1998 in Santa Barbara , California ) was an American meteorologist .

Live and act

Byers grew up in Berkeley , California and worked as a newspaper reporter for a year after graduating from high school. He then studied geography at the University of California, Berkeley and gained his first experience in the field of meteorology as a weather observer at the university . In 1928 Byers was hired as a weather observer and forecaster at Oakland Airport , where he worked for the project of the "Model Airway", a secure connection for civil aviation between San Francisco and Los Angeles, led by Carl-Gustaf Rossby .

Byers completed his bachelor's degree in geography in 1929 and his master's degree in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1932. He then worked as a research fellow at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and as an instructor in new weather forecasting techniques for the airline Transcontinental and Western Air . Between 1934 and 1935 he returned to MIT, where he did his doctorate with Rossby with the thesis "The Changes in Air Masses During Lifting".

He then moved to the US Weather Bureau , where he became head of the new department for air mass analysis . Rossby co-introduced this methodology of the " Bergen School " in the USA, but it had not yet caught on in the Weather Bureau in the mid-1930s. Byers was among other things responsible for employee training in the new methods, first in Washington and from January 1940 in Chicago . There he was successful in the same year with his initiative to found a new institute for meteorology at the University of Chicago and became its first managing director. From 1940 to 1945 Byers was Associate Professor and then until 1965 Professor at the University of Chicago. Between 1948 and 1960 he headed the Faculty of Meteorology.

Byers left Chicago in 1965 to become dean of the newly formed College of Geosciences at Texas A&M University . Until his retirement in 1974 he held the chair for meteorology there. In 1975 he was visiting professor at the Université de Clermont-Ferrand , where he gave a lecture (in French) on cloud physics.

In addition to his research, Byers was also known as a science organizer, communicator and author of textbooks. From 1944 to 1947 he was chairman of the section for meteorology of the American Geophysical Union , from 1952 to 1953 president of the American Meteorological Society and from 1960 to 1963 president of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics within the International Union for Geodesy and Geophysics . Byers was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1952 and was its section for geophysics from 1966 to 1969.

Horace Byers married Frances Isabel Clark in 1927. The couple had a daughter.

Works

  • Summer sea fogs of the central California coast (=  University of California Publications in Geography . Volume 3 , no. 5 ). University of California, Berkeley 1930, LCCN  a30-000331 .
  • Synoptic and Aerological Meteorology . McGraw-Hill, New York 1937, ISBN 978-1-114-23530-4 .
  • General Meteorology . 4th edition. McGraw-Hill, New York 1974, ISBN 978-0-07-009500-7 (first edition: 1944).
  • with Roscoe Braham: The Thunderstorm. Report of the Thunderstorm Project . US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 1949 ( PDF , 24.8 MB).
  • Thunderstorm Electricity . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1953, LCCN  53-012893 .
  • Elements of cloud physics . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1965, LCCN  65-017282 .

literature

  • Roscoe Braham: Horace Robert Byers 1906-1998 . In: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society . tape 79 , no. 12 , 1998, pp. 2810-2813 , doi : 10.1175 / 1520-0477-79.12.2810 .
  • Roscoe Braham and Thomas Malone: Horace Robert Byers 1906–1998 (=  Biographical Memoirs . Volume 79 ). The National Academy Press , Washington, DC 2001 ( nasonline.org [PDF]).
  • Roscoe Braham: The Thunderstorm Project. 18th Conference on Severe Local Storms Luncheon Speech . In: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society . tape 77 , no. 8 , 1996, pp. 1835-1846 , doi : 10.1175 / 1520-0477-77.8.1835 .

Web links

Commons : Horace R. Byers  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 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 , p. 85.
  2. ^ Douglas R. Allen: The Genesis of Meteorology at the University of Chicago. In: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. 82, 2001, pp. 1907 f., Doi : 10.1175 / 1520-0477 (2001) 082 <1905: TGOMAT> 2.3.CO; 2 .
personal data
SURNAME Byers, Horace
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Byers, Horace Robert (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American meteorologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Seattle
DATE OF DEATH May 22, 1998
Place of death Santa Barbara , California