Rossby, Carl-Gustaf Arvid

Born Dec. 28, 1898, in Stockholm; died there Aug. 19, 1957. Swedish meteorologist.

Rossby studied at the University of Stockholm in 1917 and 1918 and from 1922 to 1925, at the Geophysical Institute in Bergen under V. Bjerknes in 1918 and 1919, and at the University of Leipzig in 1920. He worked in the USA from 1926 to 1948, first in Washington, D. C., and then as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, from 1941, at the University of Chicago. He served as assistant chief of the US Weather Bureau from 1931 to 1941. In 1948 he founded and became director of the Institute of Meteorology at the University of Stockholm. From 1954 he was president of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics.

Rossby’s major works on the thermodynamics of atmospheric processes and atmospheric turbulence greatly influenced the development of mathematical models of general atmospheric circulation and numerical weather forecasting. He established the existence of long waves in the upper atmospheric layers (Rossby waves) and developed the theory for their movement. He laid the foundations for the theory of atmospheric jet streams and studied the interrelation between atmospheric and oceanic processes. Rossby’s works were the first to deal with atmospheric chemistry and atmospheric radioactivity.