Fritz Möller (16 May 1906, in Rudolstadt – 21 March 1983, in Munich) was a German meteorologist, geophysicist and high school teacher. He was a pioneer in radiation research and satellite meteorology.

Life

Möller's eponymous father was the director of the hospital in

Rudolstadt Rudolstadt is a town in the German federal state Thuringia, with the Thuringian Forest to the southwest, and to Jena and Weimar to the north. The former capital of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, the town is built along the River Saale inside a wide va ...

. Möller received a degree in Geophysics and Meteorology at the

University of Göttingen The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded ...

in 1924 and joined the Corps Thuringia Jena that same year. In 1925 he attended the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, receiving his doctorate in 1928. From 1934, he worked as a meteorologist at the

Frankfurt airport Frankfurt Airport (; german: link=no, Flughafen Frankfurt Main , also known as ''Rhein-Main-Flughafen'') is a major international airport located in Frankfurt, the fifth-largest city of Germany and one of the world's leading financial centres ...

, and then in the new Reich Office Weather Service from 1935 to 1938. After 1938 he taught at the University of Frankfurt and the

University of Leipzig Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 Decemb ...

Mainz and Munich

The new

University of Mainz The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (german: Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) is a public research university in Mainz, Rhineland Palatinate, Germany, named after the printer Johannes Gutenberg since 1946. With approximately 32,000 stu ...

appointed Möller a professor in 1948. This institute was instrumental in international radiation research. Until retirement in 1972, he headed the Meteorological Institute and the Institute of Meteorology and Climatology in Munich. In 1962, he was appointed Chair for Theoretical Meteorology.

Climate modeling

With the introduction of the computer, meteorologists in the United States began numerical experiments to develop quantitative measurement methods to study circulation and climate of the earth. In 1959 and 1960, Möller came to the United States to work with Syukuro Manabe on the numerical determination of radiative fluxes. Möller's second visit to the United States was the evaluation of measurement data from meteorological satellites. He was the only German belonging to the governing body of the Global Atmospheric Research Program. In 1963, he published a paper in the

Journal of Geophysical Research The ''Journal of Geophysical Research'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It is the flagship journal of the American Geophysical Union. It contains original research on the physical, chemical, and biological processes that contribute to the un ...

which purported to disprove

Gilbert Plass Gilbert Norman Plass (March 22, 1920 – March 1, 2004) was a Canadian physicist who in the 1950s made predictions about the increase in global atmospheric carbon dioxide () levels in the 20th century and its effect on the average temperature of ...

's influential 1953 article on the warming influence of industrial carbon dioxide. Although his model of carbon dioxide-water vapor feedback had fundamental mathematical flaws, it became widely cited in public reports which questioned the urgency of global warming.

Honors

* Honorary doctorate from the University of Mainz * Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (1959) * President of the International Association for Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics (IAMAP) (1959-1967) * Member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (1962)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Moller, Fritz 1906 births 1983 deaths German climatologists German meteorologists University of Göttingen alumni