Teisserenc de Bort, Léon Philippe

Born Nov. 5, 1855, in Paris; died Jan. 2, 1913, in Cannes. French meteorologist. Member of the Académie des Sciences (1910).

Teisserenc de Bort was on the staff of the French Central Bureau of Meteorology from 1880 to 1892. Between 1883 and 1887, he carried out observations of terrestrial magnetism in North Africa. In 1896 he founded a meteorological observatory at Trappes, near Paris. He conducted here observations with kites and, beginning in 1898, sounding balloons. The observations permitted him to establish the existence of the stratosphere. The term “stratosphere” was in fact proposed by him. He organized expeditions to carry out meteorological observations in northern Sweden, in Denmark, in the Netherlands, on the Mediterranean Sea, and on the Atlantic Ocean. Teisserenc de Bort was one of the compilers of the International Cloud Atlas (1896).