Vilhelm Bjerknes

Bjerknes was a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who argued, in a 1904 paper, that forecasting could become an exact science if the atmosphere's future state were computed from its present state using the equations of hydrodynamics and thermodynamics, a program later realized by numerical weather prediction. In 1917 he founded the Geophysical Institute in Bergen, where the group of young researchers who became known as the Bergen School, including his son Jacob Bjerknes, worked out the polar front theory of cyclone formation that reshaped synoptic forecasting through the twentieth century.