Albert Joseph Maria Defant (July 12, 1884, Trient – December 24, 1974, Innsbruck) was an Austrian meteorologist, oceanographer and climatologist.
He started working at the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics) in Vienna, Austria in 1907.
During the later years of that period, he mainly focused on large-scale atmospheric circulation and on water level changes in lakes and adjacent seas, in particular tides and seiches.
The idea that asymmetries were essential to the general circulation received only minor support until Defant (1921) proposed that the motions in middle latitudes were simply a manifestation of turbulence on a very large scale.
[5] During that time he was able to show that large-scale structures in the atmosphere can provide meridional heat transport from tropical to high latitudes.
[6][7][8] By that time he was also rated as an expert on tides, and he was invited to participate in two cruises of the German survey vessel "Panther" in the North Sea in 1925 and 1926.
He accepted a visiting appointment at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California in San Diego in 1949-1950.