Hans Ertel

A commemorative work appeared on the 100th anniversary of his birth with the title, "Meteorological and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics", published by Wilfried Schröder, with contributions by internationally renowned scientists, Science Edition, Bremen.

His geophysical works on hydrodynamics appeared as Ertel Collected Works "Geophysical Fluid Dynamics", published by Wilfried Schröder, Science Edition, Bremen, 2004.

Commemorative articles on Hans Ertel by Wilfried Schröder appeared in EOS (2004), WMO Bulletin (2004), as well as in a review in Idöjaras (Budapest, 2004).

A biography of Hans Ertel by Wilfried Schröder was published in the magazine of the Royal Meteorological Society, "Weather", in 1999.

Between 1991 and 2006, Wilfried Schröder published Collected Works of Hans Ertel, seven volumes in all, Science Edition, Bremen.

As a member of the Deutschen Akademie der Wisschaften zu Berlin, (German Academy of Sciences Berlin), or DAW, Ertel founded and led the Institute for Physical Hydrography of this academy as of 1948. In 1949, Ertel was elected to be a full member of the DAW and was its vice president from 1951 to 1961. During this time, he saw to the founding of some new academy institutes, and also ensured that all of Germany could participate during the International Geophysical Years (1957/58 and 1958/59).

In 1943, he was given the position of professor for meteorology and geophysics at the University of Innsbruck, and he also attended lectures by Arnold Sommerfeld. After Second World War, Ertel was interested in a professorship for geophysics at the University of Munich, but was instead appointed to professor for geophysics at Berlin University in 1946, where he also became the director of the Institute for Meteorology and Geophysics which belonged to the university.

Hans Ertel began his scientific career at the former Preußischen Meteorologischen Institut (Prussian Meteorological Institute), where the representatives of the Austrian school of meteorology, (Heinrich von Ficker and Albert Defant) had formative influence on him and gave him their lasting support. Ertel continued the works of Felix Maria von Exner-Ewarten, a leading theoretical meteorologist of his time who lived in Vienna, and he completed many of them. He developed into a capable theoretical physicist early on and he was already to publish research results or theoretical approaches in this subject as a young man. Ertel's famous vorticity equation of 1942 belongs today to the basic work of modern geophysics and astrophysics.

Hans Ertel (March 24, 1904 in Berlin – July 2, 1971 in Berlin) was a German natural scientist and a pioneer in geophysics, meteorology and hydrodynamics.