Sir David Brunt KBE FRS (1886–1965) was a Welsh meteorologist widely regarded as one of the founders of modern meteorology. He served as Professor of Meteorology at Imperial College, London from 1934 to 1952 and was vice-president of the Royal Society from 1949 to 1957.
He was born on the 17th of June, 1886, in Staylittle (Penffordd-las), Montgomeryshire, Wales, the youngest of the nine children of farmworker John Brunt. Up to the age of ten he attended the village school, where instruction was given in Welsh, before the family moved to the south Wales coalfield, where his father worked as a coal miner. He attended Abertillery School from 1899 to 1904, then won a scholarship to the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, gaining a first-class honours degree in mathematics in 1907, before going on to Trinity College, Cambridge.
Brunt independently co-discovered the Brunt–Väisälä frequency, describing the oscillation of a stable atmosphere, and the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica is named in his honour. During the First World War he served with the Royal Engineers' meteorological section, studying atmospheric conditions relevant to chemical warfare, and he later contributed to the theoretical work behind the FIDO wartime fog-dispersal system. He was knighted in 1949.