Alan West Brewer was a Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

-English physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

 and climatologist. Born in Montreal, Canada and raised in Derby, England, he earned a scholarship to study physics at the University College of London. He received his M.Sc. there, and began to work for the Met Office

Met Office

The Met Office , is the United Kingdom's national weather service, and a trading fund of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills...

 in 1937. During World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, he researched contrail

Contrail

Contrails or vapour trails are artificial clouds that are the visible trails of condensed water vapour made by the exhaust of aircraft engines...

s for the Royal Air Force

Royal Air Force

The Royal Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Formed on 1 April 1918, it is the oldest independent air force in the world...

, making the discovery that the stratosphere

Stratosphere

The stratosphere is the second major layer of Earth's atmosphere, just above the troposphere, and below the mesosphere. It is stratified in temperature, with warmer layers higher up and cooler layers farther down. This is in contrast to the troposphere near the Earth's surface, which is cooler...

 is much drier than had been presumed. Later this observation led to the development of Brewer-Dobson circulation

Brewer-Dobson circulation

Brewer-Dobson circulation is a model of atmospheric circulation, proposed by Alan Brewer in 1949 and Gordon Dobson in 1956, that attempts to explain why tropical air has less ozone than polar air, even though the tropical stratosphere is where most atmospheric ozone is produced...

. Brewer worked at the Subdepartment of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, University of Oxford from 1948 until 1962, when he became a professor at University of Toronto

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

. In 1977, Brewer retired from the University of Toronto, returning to England, in Devon, where he farmed until nearly 80 years old.

In late 1959, he and James Milford developed the Oxford-Kew ozone sonde. He also developed the Brewer ozone spectrophotometer with Dave Wardle which is currently the most accurate instrument for measuring ozone.

Brewer married Iris, another UCL physicist, in 1939. They had three children.