On the observation of clouds
One of the craters on the moon was named after the great inventor, as well as an asteroid numbered 8422...
Andrija Mohorovičić was a famous Croatian geophysicist who indebted the scientific community to his discoveries. One of the craters on the Moon was named after him, as well as an asteroid numbered 8422.
This intelligent and ambitious young man finished high school in Rijeka and graduated in mathematics and physics in Prague. He worked as a professor in Zagreb and Osijek. In 1882, he moved to Bakar, where he taught mathematics and physics at the Nautical School. In that school, he founded a weather station where he motivated students to observe the sky and the meteorological processes that take place there. He was particularly interested in the movements of clouds and constructed his own device for measuring the direction and speed of their movement - a nefoscope.
Ten years later, he moved to Zagreb, where he managed the Meteorological Observatory. He received his doctorate at the University of Zagreb with a dissertation entitled "On the observation of clouds and the daily and annual period of clouds in Bakr". Later, he became the manager of all meteorological stations in Banska Hrvatska and taught geophysics and astronomy at the Faculty of Arts in Zagreb. He becomes a regular member of JAZU.
One of Andrija's main interests was seismology. His motivation was the great Zagreb earthquake of 1880. In 1901, he set up a seismological station in Zagreb where there were two state-of-the-art seismographs that recorded an earthquake in the Italian city of Messina. Thanks to the earthquake, Andrija provided the scientific community with one of the most significant discoveries. He discovered the existence of a discontinuity in the earth's crust which, according to him, is called the Moho layer.
