An early and perceptive concept of cyclogenesis

Abstract

A brief commentary is provided on a paper of Heinrich von Ficker that first appeared in the Meteorologische Zeitschrift in 1920. There are two main strands to Ficker's paper. First he recapitulates, elaborates, and refines his conception of an extra-tropical cyclone as a composite of upper- and lower-level components with the former assuming primacy for cyclone dynamics. Second he sets out a novel and distinctive interpretation of Alpine lee-cyclogenesis. At the time these two strands amounted to a conspicuously novel and distinctively different view of both cyclones and orographically-related cyclogenesis. Today these self-same strands can be viewed as a particularly prescient foreshadowing of current concepts of cyclogenesis.