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John P. Finley
Born	April 11, 1854 Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Died	November 24, 1943 Battle Creek, Michigan, USA
Institutions	United States Army
Known for	Tornado research

John Park Finley (April 11, 1854 - November 24, 1943) was an American meteorologist and Army Signal Service officer who was the first person to study tornadoes intensively. He also wrote the first known book on the subject as well as many other manuals and booklets, collected vast climatological data, setup a nationwide weather observer network, started one of the first private weather enterprises, and opened an early aviation weather school.^[1][2][3][4]

Selected works

The University of Oklahoma holds a large collection of Finley's publications. Here are some selected works, which may or may not be contained in said collection:

• Finley, J. P. (1881). The tornadoes of May 29 and 30, 1879, In Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Iowa. Prof. Paper No. 4, U.S. Signal Service.
• Finley, JP, WB Hazen (1884). Charts of Relative Storm Frequency for a Portion of the Northern Hemisphere. U.S. Army Signal Office.
• --- (1884). Report of the character of six hundred tornadoes. Prof. Paper No. 7, U.S. Signal Service, 116 pp.
• --- (1887). Tornadoes: What They Are and How to Observe Them. Insurance Monitor Press, New York, 196 pp.
• --- (1889). State Tornado Charts. Amer. Meteor. J., 5.

See also

• Johannes Letzmann

References

• Murphy, Allan H. (March 1996). "The Finley Affair: A Signal Event in the History of Forecast Verification". Weather and Forecasting (American Meteorological Society) 11 (1): 3–20. doi:10.1175/1520-0434(1996)011<0003:TFAASE>2.0.CO;2. http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F1520-0434%281996%29011%3C0003%3ATFAASE%3E2.0.CO%3B2.  

External links

• John Park Finley: Early Tornado Forecasts (Bio by Keith C. Heidorn)

From Wikiquote

John Park Finley (1854–1943) was an American Army officer, pioneering meteorologist and tornado researcher.

• A single experience of this awful convulsion of the elements suffices to fasten the memory of its occurrence upon the mind with such a dreadful force that no effort can efface the remembrance of it. The destructive violence of this storm exceeds in its power, fierceness, and grandeur all other phenomena of the atmosphere.
  • Tornadoes, 1887

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

John Park Finley