His proposal was met with approval by the key scientific institution in Germany after World War I, the Emergency Association of German Science (see Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft).
When the chief scientist Merz died in Buenos Aires in June 1925, Wüst took over the leadership for the oceanographic observations.
[5] After the expedition Wüst predominantly worked on the evaluation of the obtained data sets at the Berlin institute.
He obtained the permission to teach (Habilitation) at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-University in Berlin in 1929 with a thesis on the Florida Current and was appointed Professor in 1936.
[1] The Institute and Museum of Marine Sciences in Berlin was destroyed by bombing in 1944 and was never rebuilt after the end of World War II.
Wüst became Professor of Oceanography and Maritime Meteorology at Kiel University and Director of the Institute of Marine Science.
[7][8][9][10] He succeeded in bringing back some of the earlier staff, was provided with an old villa as an institute building, obtained the research cutter Südfall and restarted marine science teaching.
Wüst brought his experience in deep-sea research to bear in the scientific orientation of the Kiel institute.
[1] After his retirement at Kiel University in 1959, Wüst followed an invitation to be a visiting professor at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory in Columbia-University, New York, USA.
He returned to the related topics of evaporation, precipitation and salinity at the ocean-atmosphere interface and their relevance for the water budget at numerous times through the following decades.
However, already at that time there were some fundamental publications on the Atlantic vertical circulation including an important interhemispheric exchange of water masses[20] and on the Florida and Antilles Current,[21] followed up later by work on the Gulf Stream and Kuroshio.
[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] His pioneering analysis of the large-scale distribution of Atlantic water masses and their regions of origin showed the strong role of interhemispheric exchange and provided the first evidence for the concentration of water mass spreading in western boundary currents.
[5][30] Until present times the data set is considered a most important basis for research in the Atlantic Ocean.
Several of Wüst’s later papers dealt with historical aspects of marine science, in particular the development of oceanography and important deep-sea expeditions.