That same year, he acquired a chair at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, in mathematics and natural philosophy, a position he held until his death.

Winds of the Northern Hemisphere was commissioned by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in an attempt to help predict the occurrence of storms.

Ultimately, both were published by the Smithsonian Institution, and provided novel theoretical contributions and a wealth of tabulated raw data for use by others.

[10] The resulting data set comprises almost 160 pages of tables, sectioned by measurement and subsequently by region.

[16] Coffin believes he can then straightforwardly claim that, though there are two prevailing trade winds, their course can, and often is, diverted by landmasses and smaller bodies of water.

[17] The remainder of the book is spent discussing particular phenomena, and explaining them in terms of the above general principles.

[22] In this case Coffin took six measurements: the mean direction of the lower currents, the ratio that the progressive motion bears to the total distance travelled, modifications that the mean current undergoes in the different seasons of the year, the directions of the forces that cause those modifications, the magnitude of those forces, and finally to show, how and to what degree the winds of the lower strata differ from the higher winds.

[24] The greater wealth of data also allows Woeikof to give a more accurately describe the extent of these winds, each of the three spanning 30° latitude from the equator on top of the other.

[26] Contrarily, it served to problematize Hadley's contemporaneous theory about the movement of the upper atmosphere, and the effect of gravity on the shape of convection cells.

Most notably, he was able to explain the mechanism behind the dry and wet seasons of Asia and Australia, as well as their corresponding monsoons.

[32] Coffin's more universally acclaimed contributions to meteorology began with his Winds of the Globe, which helped pick out flaws in the prevailing theory by Hadley.

[35][36] This, in combination with Coffin's derivation Buys-Ballot's law, found in another piece, lead Youmans to go so far as to say that Coffin's results "have been referred to in all the treatises on meteorology which have appeared since their publication, and they have been employed with other materials as the basis of the wind-charts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, prepared and published by the English Board of Trade.

"[37][36] The Smithsonian institution calls Coffin one of four people to make significant contributions to "one of the most important additions to meteorology of the present day…the establishment of the dependence of the force and direction of the wind upon the pressure of the atmosphere at different points.