C. W. Thornthwaite
Charles Warren Thornthwaite (March 7, 1899 – June 11, 1963) was an American
He was Professor of Climatology at
Life
Thornthwaite was born in
In 1930 he received a Ph.D. in geography from the University of California, Berkeley; his thesis was on "
At Central Michigan Normal School, Thornthwaite befriended John Leighly. Later, they both studied at Berkeley, with Leighly becoming his mentor. Leighly, a professor at UC Berkeley for 62 years, would write his obituary.[4][5]
In 1931 Thornthwaite published “The Climates of North America: According to a New Classification”,[6] which launched his career as a climatologist and married the science of climatology with that of geography. The article and the classification were inspired by the Köppen climate classification system. Thornthwaite learned about the Köppen while at UC Berkeley and while in Oklahoma he began to study the flaws of the classification. He then set out to create a new classification that could apply to North America. He stated in "The Climates of North America: According to a New Classification" that the effectiveness of temperature and precipitation were more important than crude measurements of temperature and precipitation. Effective temperature was the rate of plant growth resulting from temperature, and effective precipitation depended on both the amount of precipitation and the amount of water that evaporated. Thornthwaite created the P-E index to measure precipitation and evaporation, which he did from April to September in twenty-one stations in the United States. He also tried to create a T-E index to measure temperature effectiveness, an equation that gave the poleward limit of the tundra a T-E index of zero and the poleward limit of the tropical rainforest a T-E index of 128, with six temperature zones between the two limits. The T-E index was quite cumbersome and thus was not used often, but is still considered better than the previous index. Following the publication of "The Climates of North America: According to a New Classification", Thornthwaite was applying the classification on a worldwide level by collecting data from more than four thousand stations to create a world map. The map was more rational than the previous map created by Köppen but rather complicated and never popularized.[2] In 1934, he left the University of Oklahoma to study internal migration within the United States at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1935, he was appointed chief of the climatic and
Leaving government in 1946, Thornthwaite opened the Laboratory of Climatology in
Mather shared authorship with Thornthwaite in their 1955 monograph "The Water Balance",[10] which was Thornthwaite's second major contribution to climatology, after Rational Classification. The water budget was a simple and easily used methodology for estimating water surpluses and runoff, and the difference between surpluses and runoff, to estimate the amount of water would recharge an aquifer.
Thornthwaite was a professor of climatology at Johns Hopkins University from 1947 to 1955.
Personal life
Thornthwaite married Denzil Slentz in 1925. They had three daughters. When his wife died in 1962, he established the Charles Warren and Denzil Slentz Thornthwaite Memorial Scholarship Fund in her memory. The fund awards annual merit scholarships to students in meteorology and earth science at Central Michigan University.[11]
References
- ^ Much of this article is derived from a chronology by Charles H. Smith et al.
- ^ OCLC 32312947.
- ^ James O. Wheeler and Stanley D. Brunn, “An urban geographer before his time: C. Warren Thornthwaite's 1930 doctoral dissertation”, “Progress in Human Geography”, Vol. 26, No. 4, 463-486 (2002)
- ^ Berkeley: The Itinerant Geographer Archived 2008-03-13 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ University of California: In Memoriam, 1986: John Leighly, Geography: Berkeley
- ^ C. W. Thornthwaite, “The Climates of North America: According to a New Classification”, Geographical Review, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Oct., 1931), pp. 633-655
- ^ USDA Technical Bulletin #817. 1942.
- ^ "Charles P. Daly Medal recognizes UD geographer" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-12-17. Retrieved 2008-06-18.
- ^ "An Approach Toward a Rational Classification of Climate", Geographical Review
- ^ "The water balance", Climatology, 8:1-104, 1955.
- ^ "Charles Warren and Denzil Slentz Thornthwaite Memorial Scholarship Fund". Archived from the original on 2008-02-13. Retrieved 2008-06-18.
Further reading
- F. Kenneth Hare, “Obituary: Charles Warren Thornthwaite 1899-1963” Geographical Review, 53:595-597, 1963.
- John Russell Mather and Marie Sanderson, The Genius of C.Warren Thornthwaite, Climatologist-Geographer, University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. (Synopsis)
External links
- List of publications (UC Berkeley)
- The Water Balance
- C. W. Thornthwaite and F. Kenneth Hare, Climatic classification in forestry (Online)