James Farquharson FRS (1781–1843) was a Scottish minister, meteorologist, scientific writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society.
[1] On 28 January 1830 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and King's College, Aberdeen conferred on him the honorary doctorate of LL.D.
[1] From his own observations Farquharson inferred that the aurora was lower than had been generally supposed, at altitudes not extending far beyond the region of the clouds; and in a paper in the Philosophical Transactions for 1830 he showed that it was produced by the development of electricity by the condensation of water vapour.
In the volume for 1839 he gave a geometrical measurement of an aurora, one of the first attempted, which made its height less than 1 mile (1.6 km), and showed its dependency upon the altitude of the clouds.
[1] in the Philosophical Transactions for 1836, Farquharson wrote a paper on the formation of ice at the bottom of running water, a phenomenon already discussed by François Arago and others.
On the Nature and Localities of Hoar Frost, in the Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland for 1840, was related to investigations of currents of colder and warmer air moving over the face of a flat country surrounded by hills, and their effects on vegetation.