Who was Professor Finland? | ask us
STEVEN A. ACKERMAN and JONATHAN MARTIN UW-Madison Department of Aeronautical and Ocean Sciences
Q Who was Professor Finland?
A Verner Finland was a professor at UW-Madison and is known as the “father of satellite meteorology” for his historical role in defining that field.
In the late 1950s, he and Robert Parent, a professor of electrical engineering at UW, developed an instrument to measure the Earth’s thermal balance from a satellite. It was the first successful satellite operation to measure the Earth.
In 1963, he designed the Spin-Scan cloud camera, a milestone in satellite instruments that flew through the 1960s and provided high-quality images of the earth’s surface and atmosphere. These instruments laid the foundation for describing the weather for the world’s operational weather satellites.
He proposed a device to measure the distribution of atmospheric temperature and water vapor from a geostationary satellite. These were measurements that became available in the 1980s.
Professor Finland also led the development of McIDAS computer software, which is designed to analyze and interpret large data sets generated by satellite observations. This software, first developed in the early 1970s and maintained for more than 40 years, remains the primary tool for analyzing satellite weather observations at forecast centers and universities around the world.