1898-1957

Swedish meteorologist who defined the upper atmospheric wave dynamics (later called the Rossby Wave), which generates surface frontal systems, and later discovered the associated jet stream upper level winds, which he further theorized as steering the frontal mechanism. An early member of the Bergen School of Meteorology under Vilhelm Bjerknes, he began the first meteorology department in the United States at MIT (1928) and became head of and revamped the U.S. Weather Bureau. His research in large-scale atmospheric instability would be the foundation for the important baroclinic instability theory of his younger associate, Jule Gregory Charney at MIT.