Erik Palmén

Erik Herbert Palmén was a Finnish meteorologist, born in Vaasa. He worked at the University of Chicago in the Chicago school of meteorology on cyclones and weather fronts with Vilhelm Bjerknes. He contributed to the explanation of the dynamics of the jet stream and the analysis of data collected by radiosondes; his preprocessed and quality checked datasets were widely used by other researchers. Palmen was a multisided researcher who published articles in meteorology, geophysics and oceanography. The 1969 book by Palmen and Chester W. Newton, "Atmospheric Circulation Systems: Their Structure and Interpretation", is still used as lecture material in the universities around the world.