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Draft Corrections: Post 25 (Bjerknes & ENSO)

Status: COMPLETED

This document lists fact errors found in /home/michal/repos/michalbrennek.github.io/_posts/2026-04-24-He-made-Walker-right.md along with suggested text edits.

High-severity corrections

1. Rossby’s age and nationality (line 78)

Current text:

Carl-Gustaf Rossby, Norwegian-American, student of Vilhelm’s in Bergen in the 1920s, founder of the meteorology programs at MIT and the University of Chicago, and arguably the single most important meteorologist of the interwar and wartime generation, died suddenly in Stockholm on August 19, 1957, at sixty-eight.

Corrected text:

Carl-Gustaf Rossby, Swedish-American, student of Vilhelm’s in Bergen in the early 1920s, founder of the meteorology programs at MIT and the University of Chicago, and arguably the single most important meteorologist of the interwar and wartime generation, died suddenly in Stockholm on August 19, 1957, at fifty-eight.

Sources:

2. Helland-Hansen’s death date and age (line 78)

Current text:

Bjorn Helland-Hansen, Norwegian oceanographer of the previous generation and a close collaborator of Vilhelm’s in the 1910s and 1920s, had died earlier in the year, on April 22, 1957, at eighty.

Corrected text:

Bjorn Helland-Hansen, Norwegian oceanographer of the previous generation and a close collaborator of Vilhelm’s in the 1910s and 1920s, died in Bergen on September 7, 1957, at seventy-nine.

Sources:

3. Three deaths of 1957 — narrative framing (line 80)

Current text:

Three Norwegians in the ocean-atmosphere tradition, dead within four months of each other, in the same year the International Geophysical Year was scheduled to begin.

Corrected text:

Three Norwegians in the ocean-atmosphere tradition, dead within a span of three weeks in August and September 1957, in the same year the International Geophysical Year was scheduled to begin.

Reason: Helland-Hansen died Sept 7, 1957; Sverdrup Aug 21; Rossby Aug 19. They all died within about three weeks of each other, in late summer 1957 — not “within four months.”

4. Footnote 9 (line 232)

Current text:

Corrected text:

5. Jacob Bjerknes AMS presidency (line 68)

Current text:

He served as president of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics from 1948 to 1951 and of the American Meteorological Society in 1959.

Corrected text:

He served as president of the Meteorological Association (IAMAS) of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics from 1948 to 1951. He was elected Honorary Member and Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 1966.

Source: AMS Past Presidents Directory — AMS Presidents during this period were Sverre Petterssen (1958-59), Thomas F. Malone (1960-61), and Morris Neiburger (1962-63). Jacob Bjerknes never served as AMS president. The NAS biographical memoir’s “Honors and Distinctions” list does not include AMS presidency.

6. Footnote 8 (line 230)

Current text:

Corrected text:

7. Mark Cane arrival at Lamont (line 180)

Current text:

Mark Cane had come to Lamont in 1981 from MIT, where he had worked with Jule Charney on tropical dynamics. Stephen Zebiak was then his postdoc.

Corrected text:

Mark Cane had come to Lamont in 1984 from MIT, where he had earned his PhD under Jule Charney in 1975 and then served as an Assistant and Associate Professor (1979-1984). Stephen Zebiak was his graduate student at MIT.

Source: Mark Cane CV (Columbia Applied Physics) — career timeline shows MIT 1979-1984, Sr. Research Scientist L-DGO from 1984.

Medium-severity corrections

8. UCLA Meteorology Department founding (lines 22, 56)

Current text (line 22):

He founded, at UCLA, the first American department of meteorology at a civilian university.

Current text (line 56):

The UCLA Meteorology Department that Jacob Bjerknes founded in 1940 was, for its first three years, almost entirely in the business of training American military forecasters.

Recommended adjustment:

At UCLA in 1940 Bjerknes founded a meteorology training program within the Physics Department; in 1945 this became a separate Department of Meteorology, the first such civilian-university department in the United States.

OR, if keeping the original date:

The UCLA meteorology program that Jacob Bjerknes founded in 1940 (formally established as a Department in 1945) was, for its first three years, almost entirely in the business of training American military forecasters.

Source: NAS biographical memoir of Jacob Bjerknes by Arnt Eliassen (1995): “In 1940 he joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles as professor of meteorology and head of the Section of Meteorology in the Department of Physics. … In 1945 a new Department of Meteorology was established at the University of California at Los Angeles, with Jack Bjerknes as chairman.”

Also: UCLA’s own history page acknowledges Joseph Kaplan as a co-founder alongside Bjerknes and Holmboe in 1940. Could be mentioned.

9. “Eady-Holmboe analysis” attribution (line 58)

Current text:

Holmboe’s 1945 paper on baroclinic instability (known to every graduate student as the Eady-Holmboe analysis) was one of the foundational works of mid-latitude dynamical meteorology.

Recommended replacement:

Holmboe and Bjerknes co-authored the 1944 paper “On the theory of cyclones,” and Holmboe later mentored Jule Charney, whose 1947 PhD-derived paper on baroclinic instability — together with Eric Eady’s independent 1949 derivation — established the foundational works of mid-latitude dynamical meteorology.

Reason: “Eady-Holmboe analysis” is not a standard textbook label for baroclinic instability. The canonical attributions are Charney (1947) and Eady (1949). Holmboe’s most famous instability work is the Holmboe instability (1962), a stratified shear flow phenomenon distinct from baroclinic instability. The Bjerknes-Holmboe 1944 paper on cyclones is real, but is not the “Eady-Holmboe analysis.”

Source: Holmboe Wikipedia article lists his actual instability work; NAS Bjerknes memoir credits Charney with “the first mathematical solution describing growing waves on a baroclinic current.”

Minor / cosmetic items

10. Bergen School trilogy figures (line 32)

Current text:

Vilhelm, Jacob, Halvor Solberg, Tor Bergeron, Carl-Gustaf Rossby, Erik Palmen, and Sverre Petterssen built, between 1917 and the late 1920s…

Comment: This is mostly correct. Carl-Gustaf Rossby studied under Vilhelm Bjerknes in Bergen 1919-1921 before going to Stockholm and then the U.S. in 1926. He is a Bergen alum but spent only a couple of years there. The list is acceptable. Erik Palmen is Finnish, not directly a Bergen student in the 1920s but worked with the Bergen group in the 1930s. Acceptable as written.

11. Vilhelm Bjerknes Leipzig date (line 30)

Current text:

to Leipzig in 1913 when Vilhelm accepted the chair of geophysics

Comment: NAS biographical memoir of Jacob Bjerknes confirms 1913. Wikipedia’s bio of Vilhelm gives 1912-1917 for the Leipzig professorship in a table. The 1913 family move is plausible (academic year start) and confirmed by NAS memoir. NO CHANGE NEEDED.

12. Klaus Wyrtki nationality (line 116)

Current text:

The person who, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, began to piece this together from IGY data was the German-American oceanographer Klaus Wyrtki

Comment: Wyrtki was born 1925 in Upper Silesia (then Germany, now Poland). Wikipedia describes him simply as American. “German-American” is defensible historically. NO CHANGE STRICTLY REQUIRED, though one could write “German-born American” for clarity.

13. Carl-Gustaf Rossby and the Bergen School (lines 32, 78)

The post says Rossby was “student of Vilhelm’s in Bergen in the 1920s.” This is approximately right: Rossby was at the Bergen Geophysical Institute as Vilhelm’s student in 1919-1921 (per Rossby NAS memoir / Wikipedia). “Early 1920s” or “around 1920” would be more precise, but the existing text is acceptable.

High priority (factually wrong):

  • Fix Rossby’s age (58, not 68) and nationality (Swedish, not Norwegian)
  • Fix Helland-Hansen’s death date (Sept 7, 1957, not April 22) and age (79, not 80)
  • Fix the “within four months” framing for the three 1957 deaths
  • Remove/correct the false claim that Bjerknes was AMS president in 1959
  • Correct IUGG presidency to IAMAS-within-IUGG
  • Fix Mark Cane’s Lamont arrival year (1984, not 1981)
  • Reframe or remove the “Eady-Holmboe analysis” attribution

Medium priority (technically inaccurate):

  • Clarify UCLA Meteorology Department founding (1940 section, 1945 department)

Low priority / no action needed:

  • Wyrtki nationality phrasing, Vilhelm Leipzig date, Rossby Bergen years, El Chichon dates — all defensible as written.