George Templeman Kingston was born on October 5, 1816, in Oporto, Porto, Portugal.

He was a meteorologist, author, professor, and public servant. In 1830, after elementary schooling in England, he went into the Royal Navy as a midshipman and won a gold medal for mathematics at the Naval College in Portsmouth. In 1842, he left the Navy and became a student in mathematics at Cambridge (B.A., 1846; M.A., 1849). In 1852, he moved to Canada to become the first principal of a Nautical College in Quebec. When the school closed in 1855, he was appointed Professor of Meteorology at the University of Toronto and director of the magnetic observatory in Toronto, a position he held until 1880. From 1855 to 1864, Kingston published the annual mean meteorological results at Toronto in the Canadian Journal and a number of papers in both the Canadian Journal and the British American Magazine. He was also vice-president of the Canadian Institute. Because of his role in promoting and organizing the national meteorological service, Kingston is called the “Father of Canadian Meteorology."

In 1851, he married Harriette Malone (1828–1909). He died on January 21, 1886, in Toronto, Ontario.