Vilhelm Bjerknes

Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes ( born March 14, 1862 in Kristiania in Norway, † April 9, 1951 in Oslo) was a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who especially made ​​a name in the field of weather forecasts.

First, he assisted his father, Carl Anton Bjerknes in his mathematical research. In 1890 he became assistant to Heinrich Hertz with his research on electromagnetic resonance that were fundamental to the later radio technology.

Bjerknes in 1895 became professor of applied mechanics and mathematical physics at the University of Stockholm. In 1907 he moved to the University of Kristiana 1912 and followed a call to the University of Leipzig, where he became head of the Geophysical Institute. The focus of his research here was the development of the synoptic representation of atmospheric conditions. When the conditions for research in Leipzig drastically deteriorated as a result of World War I, Bjerknes 1917 returned to Norway and founded the Geophysical Institute mountains. It was here, favored by the dense along the Norwegian coast meteorological observation network, the discovery of discontinuity on the weather maps instead, which led to the polar front theory. Bjerknes, who in the atmosphere wanted to give a precise mathematical and physical basis of the dynamic processes, laid the foundations of today's numerical weather prediction.

Bjerknes published a series of textbooks. From 1926 until his retirement in 1932 he worked at the University of Oslo.

His son and co-workers in Bergen was the meteorologist Jacob Bjerknes.

1933 Bjerknes was awarded the Buys- Ballot Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. In 1936 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo (New Lines in Hydrodynamics ).

According to him, each a crater on the Moon and on Mars named, and the Berk, an obsolete unit of geopotential.