John Monteith
| John Monteith | |
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A portrait of John Lennox Monteith (date unknown)
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| Born | John Lennox Monteith September 3, 1929 |
| Died | July 20, 2012 (aged 82) |
| Known for | Application of physics in biology |
| Notable awards | FRS (1971), FRSE (1972) |
John Lennox Monteith DSc, FRS (3 September 1929 – 20 July 2012) was a British scientist who pioneered the application of physics to biology. He was an authority in the related fields of water management for agricultural production, soil physics, micrometeorology, transpiration, and the influence of the natural environment on field crops, horticultural crops, forestry, and animal production.
His pioneering work with Howard Penman on evapotranspiration is applied worldwide as the Penman-Monteith equation. It predicts evapotranspiration and is recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization for calculating irrigation quantities. Monteith's research on the role of the environment in agriculture, the physics of crop microclimate, physiology of crop growth and yield, radiation climatology heat balance in animals, and instrumentation for measuring physical and physiological variables in agriculture has been published in journals throughout the world.
He was President of the Royal Meteorological Society from 1978 to 1980. In his presidential address in 1980 he advised colleagues that unless they could understand how crop yields were determined by weather events, they would have little hope of predicting how crop yields would vary as a result of global warming and elevated CO2 levels.
When he retired in 1992 a conference on resource capture by crops was organised and a further conference was held in 2008. The American Society of Agronomy also organised a symposium in his honour in 1996. In an obituary by researchers at Nottingham it was noted it was "impossible to quantify" the impact of his research but that his influence was major judging by the large number of researchers that he supervised who held senior positions in organisations around the world.
His nomination for the Royal Society reads:
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