Geophysical Institute, Bergen

Founded in 1917 by Vilhelm Bjerknes at what was then the Bergen Museum, the Geophysical Institute became the base of the Bergen School of meteorology, the group whose finer-grained mapping of surface weather led Jacob Bjerknes to identify the frontal structure of cyclones in 1919 and the group to publish the polar front theory in 1922. Its methods, drawing weather maps at higher resolution and reading them for the physical structure of a storm rather than matching them to historical patterns, were exported across Europe and North America through the students the institute trained over the following decades.