Tor Hagfors

Tor Hagfors (18 December 1930 – 17 January 2007) was a Norwegian scientist, radio astronomer, radar expert and a pioneer in the studies of the interactions between electromagnetic waves and plasma.

In the early 1960s he was one of a handful of pioneering theorists that independently developed a theory that explained the scattering of radio waves by the free electrons in a plasma and applied the result to the ionosphere.

In the early 1960s he was one of a handful of pioneering theorists (others included Don Farley (who worked with John Dougherty) at Cornell, Ron Woodman (Harvard), Jules Fejer (UCSD), and E. E. Salpeter (also at Cornell)) that all independently developed a theory that explained the scattering of radio waves by the free electrons in a plasma and applied the result to the ionosphere.

He lectured electrical engineering at NTH from 1973 to 1982, and in 1975 he became the first director of the EISCAT scientific association, when the organization's facilities in northern Scandinavia were constructed.

Hagfors's research was very broad, comprising amongst other things ionospheric modification (heating), radar astronomy within the Solar System, observations of planetary surfaces from space, techniques in radio remote sensing, scattering from rough surfaces, thermal fluctuations in complex plasmas, antennas and radio wave propagation.