Charles Greeley Abbot

Charles Greeley Abbot (born May 31, 1872, Wilton, N.H., U.S.—died Dec. 17, 1973, Riverdale, Md.) was an American astrophysicist who, as director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Washington, D.C., for almost four decades, engaged in a career-long campaign to demonstrate that the Sun’s energy output varies and has a measurable effect on the Earth’s weather.

The youngest of four children of a New Hampshire farming family, Abbot received an M.Sc. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1895 and was immediately hired as assistant to Samuel Pierpont Langley, the first director of the Smithsonian observatory. Abbot helped Langley map the infrared spectrum of the Sun and measure the total solar radiation energy received by the Earth over a given area and time—a value called the solar constant.

Assuming acting directorship of the observatory after Langley’s death in 1906 and directorship the next year, Abbot created a synoptic monitoring program to search for possible variations in the solar constant. Abbot soon persuaded himself that sizeable variations had been detected by his staff and that they correlated with variations in the Earth’s weather. In the belief that he had found an important key to weather prediction, he spent much of the next half century trying to convince the world of its reality. The cyclic variations that Abbot observed in the solar constant, amounting to as much as 3–5 percent, actually were due to changing weather conditions and incomplete analysis of his data, as subsequently shown by satellite observations above the atmosphere and computer analysis of the data.

Abbot’s most important scientific legacies are the establishment of the modern value of the solar constant—previous estimates of which had ranged widely—at 1.93 calories per square centimetre per minute on a theoretical surface outside the atmosphere and his emphasis on the question of its variation. Modern reanalyses of Abbot’s data do show evidence for minute variations in the solar constant, confirmed by satellite observations, that are caused by changes in the number and intensity of sunspots and faculae on the solar surface.

Abbot served as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from 1928 until his retirement from both the institution and the observatory posts in 1944. To popularize the importance of solar energy, he designed solar heaters and cookers to use for lectures and demonstrations. Abbot continued to pursue his analysis of solar data in retirement, convinced of the correctness of the variations he had found.