Wladimir koppen biography

Petersburg , Russia, 25 September , d. Graz, Austria, 22 June climatology, meteorology, paleoclimatology. He was an early proponent of synoptic meteorology , and an active worker in developing the international network of observing stations that made this approach to meteorology possible. He was also the founding editor of the Meteorologische Zeitschrift and, during the half century of his contributions, maintained its position as the leading meteorology periodical in the world.

The list of his publications includes more than five hundred journal articles and books, and his lifetime as a working scientist is one of the longest on record: His first publication appeared in , and his last in Childhood and Education. His grandfather had emigrated from Germany, in the time of Catherine II , to help set up a public health system.

Petersburg , at which time his father, then sixty-seven years old, retired and took his family to his estate at Karabagh, in the Crimea. Petersburg, to the Mediterranean, arid, and subtropical climate of the Crimea. Many subsequent trips between St. Petersburg and the Crimea confirmed his intuition that vegetation is controlled to a large degree by latitude.

Completing his high school education in the Crimea, he returned to St. Petersburg for his university degree before continuing to the University of Heidelberg in Germany for his PhD—a path well trodden by Russian students with an interest in the sciences. Petersburg, where he helped prepare the daily synoptic weather map, and he began to correspond with his counterparts elsewhere in Europe.

Synoptic maps, which plot simultaneous values of meteorological elements at stations widely separated, are a staple of modern meteorology, but were just beginning to be produced at this time. In he attended the first international meteorological congress in Vienna and began his lifelong friendship with the Austrian meteorologist Julius Hann. Prospects for permanent employment in St.

From until he held the post of meteorologist of the Marine Observatory, which allowed him wide scope to pursue theoretical as well as practical investigations. In addition to his practical work in maritime meteorology and his role in helping to establish an international network of meteorological stations, his publications in the s and s reveal a strong interest in the periodicity of meteorological phenomena, looking for patterns in rainfall amounts, wind, and barometric pressure on all time scales from daily through weekly and monthly up to annual and multiyear periods.

Weather forecast service However, he would later return to Germany, moving to Hamburg in to lead the division of atmospheric telegraphy and marine meteorology at the German Maritime Observatory Deutsche Seewarte. His systematic study of the climate was innovative and original for the time, since he used balloons to obtain data from the upper layers of the atmosphere.

Wladimir koppen biography

Thus, thanks to his system, in he published the first version of his map of climatic zones, tracing the temperature belts of the world according to the monthly thermal average. In he introduced his mathematical system for classifying climates, based on the amount of rainfall and the temperature of different parts of the world. The complete version of this system would be published in and, after subsequent modifications, the definitive and final version would be published in Last years In he would retire from his post at the Hamburg Observatory and in he would decide to go to Graz, Austria, where he would spend the rest of his days.

In he co-edited a work on climatology that, in principle, was to have five volumes called "Handbuch der Klimatologie" "Manual of Climatology" , with the help of German meteorologist Rudolph Geiger. After his death in , his colleague Geiger continued work on modifications to the climate classification system. He was also interested in social issues, such as land use, educational reforms and improving the diet of the most disadvantaged layers.

He earned his doctoral degree in Petersburg from to , where he published 12 research articles. He moved on to the North German Sea Watch, a naval observatory in Hamburg, in , where he developed a forecasting service for northwestern Germany and nearby waters, described the motion of cold fronts, and studied the upper atmosphere. Along with Matthew Maury, he produced wind charts that were valuable to ocean traders and the military.

The maps were later used by Tor Bergeron during his research on air masses. This research resulted in his first attempt at climate classification in , but his early system did not receive much recognition. Subsequent work led to the development of his widely known classification scheme in