Ragnar Fjørtoft

Ragnar Fjørtoft (born August 1, 1913 in Kristiania , † May 28, 1998 in Oslo ) was a Norwegian meteorologist.

Life

The son of a school principal grew up in Kristiania. At the age of 14 he moved with his family to Trondheim , where he took the Artium exam in 1933. He then moved back to Oslo, where he was taught meteorology by Halvor Solberg . On March 29, 1939, he married Ragnhild Nordskog. In the same year he moved to Bergen to produce weather forecasts for Vestlandet . In 1946 he delivered a thesis on the stability of circular vortices.

In 1949 Fjørtoft moved to the USA, where he joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Together with Jule Charney , Philip Thomson , Larry Gates and John von Neumann , he succeeded in producing the first numerical weather forecast . In 1951 he moved back to Norway and received his doctorate there. phil. at the University of Oslo with a dissertation on the stability of atmospheric currents.

Fjørtoft has received numerous awards, including the St. Olav Order (Knight 1st Class 1967), the Fridtjof Nansen Prize for Outstanding Research from the Nansenfonds (1977) and the Prize of the International Meteorological Organization (1991).

supporting documents

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Enok Palm : Ragnar Fjørtoft . In: Norsk biografisk leksikon (NBL). Volume 3, Kunnskapsforlaget , Oslo 2001.
2. Jump up ↑ Jule Charney, Ragnar Fjørtoft, John von Neumann: Numerical Integration of the Barotropic Vorticity Equation. In: Tellus. 2, No. 4, 1950, doi: 10.1111 / j.2153-3490.1950.tb00336.x .

literature

• Kristine Harper: Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology . MIT Press, Cambridge 2008, ISBN 978-0-87590-423-8 .
• Frederik Nebeker: Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 20th Century . Academic Press, San Diego 1995, ISBN 978-0-12-515175-7 .