William Ferrel

William Ferrel ( born January 29, 1817 Bedford, now Fulton County, Pennsylvania, USA, † September 18, 1891 in Martinsburg, West Virginia) was an American meteorologist.

Ferrel developed theories to explain the planetary circulation and designed a machine to predict the tides.

Life

Ferrel grew up in very poor circumstances, that earned his knowledge as an autodidact and eventually became teachers. The observation of a partial solar eclipse in 1832 spurred him on to further studies. In 1837 he had saved enough to start studying. He graduated in 1844 and then worked further as a teacher. In 1854 he founded his own school in Nashville Tennessee. After moving to Nashville, he was able to use libraries for the first time. Three years later, a job with the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac in Cambridge (Massachusetts ), he was offered, he accepted a year later.

From 1867 to 1882 he worked for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey ( USCGS ) until his retirement in 1886 at the Signal Service.

Performance

Around the year 1850 he came across a treatise on the tides and discovered that Pierre- Simon Laplace had to be a mistake on celestial mechanics in his famous treatise: the effect of the sun and moon on the tides on earth must the Earth's rotation to slow down slowly. ( Laplace had not included the effect of friction. ) His own work on this subject was published in 1853 in the Astronomical Journal.

In 1856 he published his article An essay on the winds and currents of the ocean, where he presented first a plausible explanation for the wind circulation in the middle latitudes of the Earth. In 1858 he published the article The influence of the Earth 's rotation upon the relative motion of bodies near its surface; he noted herein that an object that moves on the earth due to the earth's rotation to the right ( in the Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere: left) is deflected. ( Almost simultaneously, the Dutch meteorologist Christoph Buys- Ballot had his formulation of the same fact found: Buys- Ballot 's law ( Barisches Wind Act) ).

During his time in Cambridge Ferrel was in contact with mathematicians such as Simon Newcomb or Asaph Hall, and published a series of important articles on the subject of hydrodynamics.

In the following years he published yet: Popular Essays on the Movements of the Atmosphere (1882 ), Temperature of the Atmosphere and the Earth 's Surface (1884), Recent Advances in Meteorology (1886 ), and A Popular Treatise on the Winds (1889 ).

In 1880, he suggested a mechanism by which the tide could be calculated in advance. This unit went into operation three years later; with its help the tide for the Coast and Geodetic Survey Tide Tables 1885 were determined. It was on duty for 25 years.