William Ferrel

William Ferrel was born in January 29, 1817 Fulton county, Southern Pennsylvania. He was an american meteorologist. His family moved to west Virginia in 1829. His formal elementary schooling was limited and he taught himself using science books well enough to become a school teacher. He attended Marshall  College and despite financial difficulties, he was able to graduate from Bethany College's first graduating class in 1844. Ferrel began his career as a scientist and he concentrated on tidal theory. Ferrel extended the non harmonic developments of the tide-producing potential beyond the points reached by Laplace and Lubbock and demonstrated that it is the tendency of rising warm air, as it rotates due to the Coriolis effect, to pull in air from more southerly, warmer regions and transport it pole ward, and for that It is this rotation which creates the complex curvatures in the frontal systems separating the cooler Arctic air to the north from the warmer continental tropical air to the south. He developed theories which explained the mid-latitude atmospheric circulation cell in detail, and it is after him that the Ferrel cell was named. Ferrel cell explained that the air flows pole ward and eastward near the surface and equator ward and westward at higher altitudes this movement is the reverse of the airflow in the Hadley cell. Ferrel created the tide predicting machine and set it  up to predict the ebb and flow of sea tides.