Wilhelm Matthäus Schmidt

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Wilhelm Matthäus Schmidt (the middle name also appears in the spelling Mathäus ; * January 21, 1883 in Vienna ; † November 27, 1936 there ) was an Austrian physicist , meteorologist , climatologist and director of the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG).

Career

Wilhelm Matthäus Schmidt was born as the son of the historian and geographer Wilhelm Schmidt (1843–1924) and his wife Maria (1854–1939), graduated from high school and began studying mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna in 1901 , where he qualified as Dr. . phil. received his doctorate . His teachers included Ludwig Boltzmann and Felix Maria von Exner-Ewarten , whose successor he was to become director of the ZAMG .

From 1905 to 1919 he worked at the ZAMG in Vienna, where he initially worked as an assistant, later as an adjunct and secretary. In 1911 he completed his habilitation at the University of Vienna for Earth Physics and in 1919 was appointed full professor for meteorology and climatology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. In 1930 he succeeded Felix Maria von Exner-Ewarten as professor for Earth Physics at the University of Vienna and as director of ZAMG.

Schmidt carried out his functions until his death in 1936. He had been married to his wife Gertrude since 1913, in whom he had an understanding partner. Wilhelm Matthäus Schmidt is buried in the Heiligenstadt cemetery in Vienna.

Schmidt's scientific work

Schmidt developed new measuring methods in a series of experiments and created the instrumental aids for them. His attempts to illustrate the formation of the gust head and the gust process by the flowing of a heavy liquid under a lighter one met with great attention. To check this experimentally found idea in the wild, he constructed a variograph to record small pressure fluctuations.

His most important scientific achievement lay in the quantitative recording of the "exchange", the effect of the disordered movements in air and water. For the necessary observations he developed the necessary new aids and methods. He summarized the complex of questions in his main work “The mass exchange in the open air and related phenomena” and his findings led him to a new area of ​​research, the small and microclimate , which is important for oceanography and agriculture. He founded a close-knit network of registration stations for temperature and humidity in order to be able to record the small-scale effects on local climatic peculiarities under the influence of radiation. The result brought important new insights into microclimatic differences and their causes.

He conducted meteorological field tests on the risk of frost and frost protection and had cars equipped with technical equipment drive through the city, which took measurements to record the differences in the urban climate at different times of the day and year.

During his last years, Schmidt also devoted himself to biometeorology and in the last of his 198 publications, together with E. Brezina, summarized the relationship between the weather and human condition as well as the artificial climate created in the form of clothing, housing and urban construction.

He was a balloonist himself and, inspired by this activity, dealt with problems of aerology and flight weather advice. He later gave additional lectures on these subjects at the university.

During the world economic crisis , he made Austria the country with the densest meteorological observation network and, through his bioclimatic studies, laid the foundations for a scientific and medical discipline that is gaining more and more attention today.

Publications (selection)

  • Dissertation: "About a method for determining the adiabatic compression modulus of liquids"
  • 1914: “About the essence of thunder” in the meeting reports of the Austrian Academy of Sciences , No. 123, pp. 821–63
  • 1915: “The influence of d. Heat of fusion on d. Climate v. Vienna ” in the meeting reports of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, No. 124, pp. 517–66
  • 1915: "Radiation and evaporation on open water surfaces " in the Annals of Hydrography and Maritime Meteorology, No. 43, pp. 11–178
  • 1917: "The mass exchange in the disordered flow in the open air and its consequences" , in the meeting reports of the ÖAW, No. 126, pp. 757–804
  • 1918: "Measurements of the dust core content of the air on the edge of a large city" , in Meteorologische Zeitschrift, pp. 281–85
  • 1918: "About the distribution of radioactive gases in the free atmosphere" , in Physikalische Zeitschrift, No. 19, pp. 109–14 (with Victor Franz Hess )

Memberships

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member entry by Wilhelm Schmidt at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on September 1, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Schmidt, Wilhelm Matthäus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmidt, Wilhelm Mathäus; Schmidt, Wilhelm Matthias; Schmidt, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian physicist, meteorologist, climatologist and director of the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG)
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 1936
Place of death Vienna , Austria