Abbott Lawrence Rotch

Abbott Lawrence Rotch (January 6, 1861 – April 7, 1912) was an American meteorologist and founder of the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, the longest continually operating observation site in the United States and an important site for world climatology.

Abbott Lawrence Rotch was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 6, 1861. As a young man, Rotch became interested in the newly developing science of meteorology and determined to make this field his lifetime career. By the time he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1884, Rotch had conceived and carried into execution his plans for erecting a meteorological observatory on the summit of the Great Blue Hill, ten miles (16 km) south of Boston in the Blue Hills Reservation, a 6,000 acre (24 km²) public park managed by the Metropolitan District Commission of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in Milton, Massachusetts. Rotch chose the site because the elevation of 635 feet (194 m) was the highest point within ten miles (16 km) of the Atlantic Ocean anywhere on the East Coast south of central Maine. His purpose was to establish an institution free from official control where investigations might be independent of prescribed duties and requirements. Since Rotch was independently wealthy, he carried out his plan using his own funds. The observatory building was completed by the end of 1884 and the first regular observations were begun on February 1, 1885. Construction of the observatory was started by Rotch in 1884 using his own private funds.

In 1885 Rotch was able to obtain basic data on the heights and movements of various clouds by means of triangulation measurements. In 1894, Rotch became the first in the world to sound the atmosphere by lifting instruments on kites. Ultimately kites sounded the atmosphere to an altitude of 5 kilometers and provided Rotch with information concerning fundamental upper air patterns of wind, temperature, and humidity, as well as their relationship to surface weather patterns. In 1904, at the St. Louis World's Fair, Rotch initiated the use of sounding balloons in the U.S. These balloons carried recording instruments beyond even the highest clouds to a height of 17 kilometers. Rotch and Leon Teisserenc de Bort, discoverer of the stratosphere, made extensive upper-air kite measurements from ships in the tropical and sub-tropical North Atlantic. These permitted publication in 1911 of a chart of aerial routes, thus pointing the way to the feasibility of transatlantic air travel aided by air patterns. Rotch became the first director of the observatory and maintained it at his own expense until his death in 1912, when he bequeathed it to Harvard University with an endowment of $50,000.

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