Ragnar Fjørtoft
Ragnar Fjørtoft ( born August 1, 1913 in Kristiania ( now Oslo ), † 28 May 1998 in Oslo) was a Norwegian meteorologist.
Life
The son of a headmaster grew up in Oslo. At 14, he moved with his family to Trondheim, where he took off the exam of Arts in 1933. Then he moved back to Oslo, where he was taught by Halvor Solberg in meteorology. On 29 March 1939 he married Ragnhild Nordskog. In the same year he moved to mountains, there to produce weather forecasts for Vestlandet. In 1946 he delivered a paper on the stability of circular vortices.
In 1949 moved Fjørtoft in the United States, where he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Together with Jule Charney, Philip Thomson, Larry Gates, and John von Neumann, he managed to produce the first numerical weather forecast. In 1951 he moved back to Norway and received his PhD in Dr. phil. at the University of Oslo with a dissertation on the stability of the atmospheric currents.
Fjørtoft received numerous awards, including the Olav's Medal ( 1st class knight 1967), the Fridtjof Nansen Prize for outstanding research in the Nansenfondet (1977) and the Prize of the International Meteorological Organization (1991).