Erik Palmén
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Erik Herbert Palmén (August 31, 1898, Vaasa, Finland - March 19, 1985) was the most famous researcher of meteorology in Finland. He worked together with Vilhelm Bjerknes with theory on cyclones and weather fronts and was intimately involved in explaining the dynamics of the jet stream in University of Chicago in so called Chicago school of meteorology (started by Carl-Gustaf Rossby). He was also respected for his analysis of data collected by radiosondes; his preprocessed and quality checked datasets were widely used by other researchers. Palmen was a multisided researcher who published articles in meteorology, geophysics and oceanography. The 1969 book by Palmen and Chester W. Newton, "Atmospheric Circulation Systems: Their Structure and Interpretation", is still used as lecture material in the universities around the world.
Palmen was the director of Finnish Institute of Marine Research, a professor in Helsinki University and a member of the Finnish Academy of Arts and Letters. His nickname by students, friends and colleagues was Maestro and he was well known for his passion for cigars and interest of effects of weather on agriculture.
Palmen received the Buys-Ballot Medaille of Royal Dutch Academy in 1964. Then, when enough computing power was available and the first steps of numerical weather prediction were taken, the value of work done by the Chicago School 10-20 years earlier was really appreciated.
