| RefNo | EC/1990/41 |
| Level | Item |
| Title | Lorenz, Edward Norton: certificate of election to the Royal Society |
| Date | 1989 |
| Description | Certificate of Candidate for Election to Foreign Membership. Citation typed |
| Citation | Edward Lorenz is a distinguished meteorologist who has brought mathematical rigour elegance and precision to the difficult problem of forecasting weather and climate.
Early in his career he formulated the concept of available potential energy, a quantity that is basic to our understanding of the energetics of the atmosphere. It is now established as a fundamental thermodynamic variable and is central to the interpretation of climate and climatic variability.
Since 1960, in a series of brilliant papers Ed Lorenz has studied the theory of predictability of atmospheric flow patterns, showing that different solutions of the equations of motion develop from initial conditions that are nearly the same, so that unavoidable errors in observing the present state of the atmosphere inevitably lead to uncertainty in a forecast.
He discovered that the equations lead to unexpected solutions that appear random and chaotic. His analysis provided a new way of looking at irregular, turbulent or generally unpredictable flows and other workers have extended its use to other problems such as chemical reactions and population dynamics. The notion of chaos has led to an exciting new branch of mathematics.
Professor Lorenz has received many honours and awards, both national and international, including every major award of the American Meteorological Society and honours from the Royal Meteorological Society, the World Meteorological Organisation, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Perhaps the most prestigious is the Crafoord Prize of the Swedish Academy of Sciences for fundamental contributions in the field of geophysical hydrodynamics which in 1983 was awarded jointly to Lorenz and Henry Stommel For. Mem. R.S. |
| AccessStatus | Closed |
Fellows associated with this archive
| Code | PersonName | Dates |
| NA3748 | Lorenz; Edward Norton (1917 - 2008) | 1917 - 2008 |