Otto Miehlke

Otto Miehlke (born October 21, 1920 in Demmin , Western Pomerania ; † June 17, 2008 ) was a German physicist and head of the GDR's water level and ice service .

Life

Miehlke was the son of a railroad employee; soon after the birth, the family moved to neighboring Barth . Otto Miehlke passed the Abitur at the high school for boys in Stralsund. In 1939 he was drafted into the Reich Labor Service in Ummanz / Rügen and at the beginning of 1940 for military service. While serving in the anti-aircraft cartillery, Czech partisans shot him in the left forearm in May 1945 and he was released from Soviet captivity in August 1946.

He completed a teacher training course as well as a six-semester course at the pedagogical faculty at the University of Greifswald (physics and mathematics) and worked as a teacher. In 1950 he married Dora Nimz, with whom he had a daughter.

In September 1950, the former captain Hans von Petersson (1905-1992) brought him to the Baltic Sea Observatory of the Sea Hydrographic Service of the GDR People's Navy in Warnemünde, where he was "Senior Consultant for Water Levels". For the naval forces and disaster response, he was supposed to develop a reliable forecasting method for the water levels on the GDR coast, which could be used for small deviations from mean water levels as well as for storm floods. Together with the oceanologist Günther Sager , we succeeded in setting up an empirical forecasting method which also took into account the wind conditions in the central Baltic Sea.

In 1957/58 he attended lectures as a guest auditor at the University of Greifswald and in 1959 presented his diploma thesis on the accuracy of the third German tide calculator. In the following year he received his doctorate with Walter Schallreuter with the thesis "On the calculation of the static air pressure effect on the water level of closed sea basins".

His studies and reports on questions of the design water level of coastal protection works, the ice conditions on the GDR coast, keeping the Bodden waters clean, flow conditions in the Unterwarnow, routing on the ferry line Klaipeda-Mukran, hydraulic problems and the drifting of surface pollution on the Baltic Sea in front of the GDR coasts were kept secret during GDR times and are in the library of the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH) in Rostock.

In 1970 his “Office for Research and Development (North)” comprised around 60 employees and carried out research on a commission from the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (RGW) together with Russian scientists. When Roger Schallreuter , the son of his doctoral supervisor, made himself unpopular by not joining the SED , he brought him to his office and provided him with scientific literature three years later while he was in custody. Miehlke himself was a member and functionary of the SED. A fossil mussel crab Miehlkella cribroporata, discovered by Schallreuter, was later named after Miehlke.

literature

• Obituary Dr. Otto Miehlke ( Memento from February 19, 2014 on WebCite ). In: The Coast , Heft 75 (2009), pp. 267–271