G. M. B. Dobson

Who was G. M. B. Dobson?

Gordon Miller Bourne Dobson FRS was a British physicist and meteorologist who did important work on ozone.

He was educated at Sedbergh School and Caius College, Cambridge where he graduated MA. He was later awarded DSc.

He was appointed University Lecturer in Meteorology, Oxford. By studying meteorites he noticed that the temperature profile of the tropopause was not constant, as had previously been believed. In fact there was, he showed, a region where the temperature sharply rose. This, he proposed, was happening because UV radiation was heating ozone in what has become known as the ozone layer. He noted the connection between sunspots and weather, and measured the ultraviolet levels of our star. He built the first Dobson ozone spectrophotometers and studied the results over many years. The Dobson unit, a unit of measurement of vertically integrated atmospheric ozone density, is named after him.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May, 1927, awarded their Rumford Medal in 1932 and delivered their Bakerian lecture in 1945.

He served as president of the Royal Meteorological Society from 1947 to 1949. He was made CBE in 1951.