Abstract
THE Council of the Royal Meteorological Society has made the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society of April 1934 a special “Shaw Number”, in honour of Sir Napier Shaw's eightieth birthday. Sir Napier Shaw has done a great deal to educate English people to a recognition of the practical importance of meteorology. Under the title “The March of Meteorology” he has contributed to his own number of the Journal a valuable collection of random recollections. This contribution is, besides being much else, an inner history of the evolution of the Meteorological Office during a period of about thirty years which followed his first connexion with official meteorology. One of Sir Napier's greatest personal contributions to meteorology haa been connected with the thermodynamical theory built up around the idea of the Carnot cycle—a conception of an ideal heat engine often despised by students of engineering as being of no conceivable practical significance. In his “Manual of Meteorology”, the general circulation of the atmosphere receives masterly treatment with the aid of this cycle and of the special diagrammatic framework with temperature and entropy as abscissæ and ordinates which he has named the ‘tephigram’. Although the full harvest from these “ideas is perhaps still to come, they have thrown light on many atmospheric processes previously only very imperfectly understood. Another important contribution, ajid one that greatly advanced weather forecasting with the aid of synoptic charts, was the “Life History of Surface Air Currents”(1906). This was the joint work of Sir Napier and his personal assistant, R. G. K. Lempfert. This study, in his own words, “began the analysis of the motion of the air of a cyclonic depression into distinct currents which has been so fruitful in the hands of the Norwegian meteorologists”. By the writing of these reminiscences at the age of eighty, Sir Napier Shaw shows the staying power characteristic of so many eminent scientific workers who became prominent in a period when the troubles of civilisation were less all-pervading, and he reveals in them the broad outlook more common in a less specialised age.
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Sir Napier Shaw, F.R.S. Nature 133, 940 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133940a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133940a0