Wladimir Köppen: biography of this geographer and climatologist

Wladimir Köppen was one of the most important geographers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although at first his studies turned to botany, as time went by he became more and more interested in the climate of both modern times and the past.

Of Russian origin but with German lineage, Köppen has been a benchmark both in Germany, Russia and the rest of the world when it comes to geography, meteorology and climatology, being very famous its classification system of the Earth's climates, in force today with some modification.

Let's see the life and contributions of this scientist, where his interest in plants and climates came from and what are his main works, through a biography of Wladimir Köppen.

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Brief biography of Wladimir Köppen

Wladimir Köppen was a Russian geographer, meteorologist, climatologist and botanist of German origin. He came from a line of illustrious people, since his grandfather was a great doctor, who came to serve the Russian monarchy under the tsars, and his father was a great anthropologist and geographer. His grandfather's interest in the natural sciences and his father's in the social sciences led Wladimir Köppen to take a bit of both, taking an interest in botany and geography.

Early years

Wladimir Petrovich Köppen was born on October 8 (Gregorian calendar) / September 25 (Julian calendar), 1846 in Saint Petersburg, Russian empire. Her grandfather was one of the many German doctors invited by Empress Catherine II to improve the country's health, who also became the Tsar's personal physician. Her father, Peter von Köppen (1793-1864) was a noted geographer, historian, and ethnographer of ancient Russian cultures who worked at the Saint Petersburg Academy.

Köppen's father fostered intellectual contacts between Russian scientists and the Slavs (experts in Slavic cultures) from Western countries. In gratitude for the services of Peter von Köppen, Tsar Alexander II (1818-1881) of Russia made him an academic and she granted a farm on the southern coast of Crimea, a place that would be very important during the childhood of Wladimir.

Crimea was a place very rich in flora and fauna, a nature that aroused the interest of the young Wladimir Köppen and that started his first botanical explorations.. The richness of the place made him start looking for an explanation of how temperature influenced the varieties of plants in a certain place. These explorations would be carried out in his spare time, after finishing his classes at the Simferopol secondary school, in the Crimean peninsula.

Academic training

After completing high school in the Crimea, Wladimir Köppen he enrolled in botany at the University of Saint Petersburg, where he would begin his classes in 1864. He would not be there forever since in 1867 he would be transferred to the University of Heidelberg. Later, in 1870, he would go to the University of Leipzig, the same center where he would defend his doctoral thesis on the effects of temperature on plant growth.

In the course of the Franco-Prussian war Wladimir Köppen served the ambulance medical corps, experience which would help him to work later in his hometown at the Central Medical Observatory of San Petersburg. Without leaving Russia, between 1872 and 1873 Wladimir Köppen would work at the Russian Meteorological Service.

Weather forecast service

However, he would later return to Germany, moving to Hamburg in 1875 to lead the division of atmospheric telegraphy and marine meteorology at the German Maritime Observatory (Deutsche Seewarte). Köppen's task in that institution was to take care of the weather forecast service for northwestern Germany and neighboring countries.

His systematic study of the climate was innovative and original for the time, since he used balloons to obtain data from the upper layers of the atmosphere. Thus, thanks to his system, in 1884 he published the first version of his map of climatic zones, tracing the temperature belts of the world according to the monthly thermal average.

In 1900 he introduced his mathematical system for classifying climates, based on the amount of rainfall and the temperature of different parts of the world. The complete version of this system would be published in 1918 and, after subsequent modifications, the definitive and final version would be published in 1936.

Last years

In 1919 he would retire from his post at the Hamburg Observatory and in 1924 he would decide to go to Graz, Austria, where he would spend the rest of his days. In 1930 he co-edited a work on climatology that, in principle, was to have five volumes called "Handbuch der Klimatologie" ("Manual of Climatology"), with the help of German meteorologist Rudolph Geiger. This work was never completed, since Köppen only managed to publish three of the five planned volumes.

Wladimir Petróvich Köppen died on June 22, 1940 at the age of 93 in the city of Graz, at that time Austria under the Nazi regime. After his death in 1940, his colleague Geiger continued work on modifications to the climate classification system.

Life and personal interests

The figure of Köppen in his lifetime was that of a prolific scientist who produced more than 500 scientific documents. which demonstrate his great interest and curiosity for science, especially the climatology of which he is so expert it was. He was also interested in social issues, such as land use, educational reforms and improving the diet of the most disadvantaged layers. He was a defender of peace and Esperanto, advocating the use of Esperanto, an auxiliary language that he knew how to speak and that, in fact, he made several publications in it.

But he not only dedicated himself to describing the climates of the time, but also investigated how they must have been in older times. He was a pioneer of the science of paleoclimatology and he tried to expose his knowledge and theories in a scientific document published in 1924, called "Die Klimate der geologischen Vorzeit" (The climates of the geological past), along with his son-in-law Alfred Wegener, a German scientist who would be known for his theory of drift continental. This text supported the theory of ice ages proposed by the Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milanković.

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Classification of the Earth's climates

As we have commented, the greatest merit of Wladimir Köppen among the many that he had was his classification of the Earth's climates. Although throughout the nineteenth century he already made his first sketches and publications on this question, in 1918 he revised his first climatic scheme of his, originally published in 1900, and he did not stop improving it during his last years of lifetime.

When he died in 1940, his proposal had already become widely popular, being used by both geographers and climatologists., especially the aforementioned Trewartha. They were adapting and improving this classification, arriving at the current model.

Today the classification of the Earth's climates is essential to understand how nature is distributed and adapted according to climate and rainfall. It is an empirical classification, which groups climates based on what effects they have on an element or climate-dependent phenomenon, originally the Köppen proposal being very focused on vegetation natural.

In the original classification, Köppen combined rainfall and temperatures taking into account the fixed annual and monthly values, regardless of the causes. Based on the majority vegetation of a certain region, temperatures and rainfall, that area was grouped into one or another climatological group. To each climate he assigned a letter, being originally five the great climatological types that Wladimir Köppen proposed:

• A: tropical rainy climates
• B: dry climates
• C: temperate and humid climates
• D: boreal or snow and forest climates
• E: polar or snow climates

After subsequent revisions by Köppen himself and other scientists, the letters F (equatorial climate) and H (alpine climate) would be added. All these climates are defined by temperature criteria and the type of vegetation present., with the exception of climate B in which only rainfall is taken into account.

Bibliographic references:

• Wille, Robert-Jan Wille (2017): Colonizing the Free Atmosphere: Wladimir Köppen’s ‘Aerology’, the German Maritime Observatory, and the Emergence of a Trans-Imperial Network of Weather Balloons and Kites, 1873-1906
• Alby, Michael (3002). Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate. New York: Facts On File, Inc. ISBN 0-8160-4071-0 (English).
• Else Wegener-Köppen, Jörn Thiede (2018): Wladimir Köppen: Scholar for Life (Ein Gelehrtenleben für die Meteorologie), Borntraeger Science Publishers ISBN 978-3-443-01100-0, 316p.