Historical Sunspot Drawings

Scanned at the Observatory Kanzelhöhe

These drawings have been sent to us by Esther Lurf, she got them from her father, who got them more then 20 years ago.
On one of the sheets the name Dr. Myrbach was found - we assumed that this is the name of the observer.
Just by chance we found in the book "Beobachtungs und Messmethoden des Wetterdienstes" by Josef Gutmann an author called Otto Myrbach - some investigations in this direction led to the person who performed these drawings: Dr. Otto Myrbach-Rheinfeld

Otto Myrbach was born on Oct. 14 1886 in Graz/Austria and he died on Jan. 13 1969 in Salzburg/Austria. He was a well-known austrian meteorologist in the first half of the last century.
He studied physics, biology, anatomy and political economics at the university of Innsbruck, during his studies he was more and more fascinated by meteorology. In 1909 he received his PhD about irradiation measurements of the sun. Some months later in the same year he began his work at the Austrian Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics. There he was responsible for the official weather forecast till the annexion of Austria 1938. Afterwards he was posted to the German meteorological service until his retirement in 1943.
He got international publicity in 1926 with his work "Atmen der Atmosphäre" , where he presented the rhythm of the atmospheric airmass changes between oceans and continents. Between 1929 and 1943 he observed daily sunspots in order to show the connection between solar activity and weather patterns.
From this period we have some drawings, the year 1938 is almost complete, there are also some figures of kulminations of small singular spots.