Reflections of an Equatorial Oceanographer
103
course the following spring. He was interested in the dynamics of point vortices in a
circular ocean basin on a beta plane, and had arranged with Ed Fredkin to help with the
computations. Fredkin had a programming business in Maynard, Massachusetts, in the
same warehouse with the Digital Equipment Corporation, and he would occasionally
get a block of time on one of their machines. The only problem was, it was always
midnight until 8 AM, and we did not find out about it until late the night before. Hank
would call me around 10 PM, I would drive to Lexington to meet him, and we would
proceed to Maynard for a night of computing. We had a lot of fun with this problem.
I was able to show that vortices on a beta plane should accelerate near a western
boundary and decelerate near an eastern boundary.
In the summer of 1962 I sat in Henry Stommel’s lab at WHOI, along with Tommy
Rossby, who was doing thermal convection experiments using mercury as the working
fluid. Eric Kraus sat across the hall and we often played chess at lunchtime. Early in
the summer I saw a notice about a summer school on air–sea interaction that Henry
Charnock was organizing at Imperial College, London. I wrote Charnock but got no
reply. I mentioned this to Kraus, who suggested I go talk to Columbus Iselin, the
former WHOI Director. Iselin said he thought I should go to the meeting. He picked
up the phone and told Henry Behrens, the WHOI comptroller, to arrange it! Richard
Goody and Allan Robinson, who ran the program I was enrolled in at Harvard, were
surprised to see me in London. They had brought Stan Jacobs and Victor Barcilon to
the meeting, and did not expect any other Harvard students. I had a great two weeks in
London and learned some basics of air–sea interaction and ocean circulation. During
the 1962–1963 school year I completed my graduate course requirements.
In 1963 Henry Stommel decided to move to MIT, and I decided to stay at
Harvard. I felt comfortable there, and the Committee on Applied Mathematics only
required reading knowledge of one foreign language. I already knew enough German
to pass that requirement. So I switched to Allan Robinson as my adviser. I spent a
fair amount of time working on the computation of second-order nonlinear effects
for barotropic Rossby waves on a midlatitude beta plane. I stayed in Cambridge in
the summer of 1964 but Allan Robinson and Francis Bretherton both were at the
GFD course at WHOI. Bretherton gave a lecture on time-dependent motions near the
equator, and Robinson suggested to me that I investigate the baroclinic waves on an
equatorial beta plane, with a view toward studying the nonlinear effects. So starting
in the fall of 1964 I began to work on equatorial waves. Rattray (1964), Blandford
(1966), Matsuno (1966), and Rattray and Charnell (1966) all published important
papers on the topic. Rattray and Charnell tried to find equatorial wave solutions in
a closed basin, and I was not satisfied with the approximations they used to obtain
their result. The focus of my thesis turned out to be how to construct wave solutions
in an equatorial basin bounded by eastern and western boundaries, but open to the
north and south. The modes I constructed all had energy propagating equatorward
from high latitudes on the western boundary and an equal energy flux going poleward
on the eastern boundary. Michael Longuet-Higgins was producing similar modes
on a sphere at the same time. For some reason I never looked at reflections off an
103
course the following spring. He was interested in the dynamics of point vortices in a
circular ocean basin on a beta plane, and had arranged with Ed Fredkin to help with the
computations. Fredkin had a programming business in Maynard, Massachusetts, in the
same warehouse with the Digital Equipment Corporation, and he would occasionally
get a block of time on one of their machines. The only problem was, it was always
midnight until 8 AM, and we did not find out about it until late the night before. Hank
would call me around 10 PM, I would drive to Lexington to meet him, and we would
proceed to Maynard for a night of computing. We had a lot of fun with this problem.
I was able to show that vortices on a beta plane should accelerate near a western
boundary and decelerate near an eastern boundary.
In the summer of 1962 I sat in Henry Stommel’s lab at WHOI, along with Tommy
Rossby, who was doing thermal convection experiments using mercury as the working
fluid. Eric Kraus sat across the hall and we often played chess at lunchtime. Early in
the summer I saw a notice about a summer school on air–sea interaction that Henry
Charnock was organizing at Imperial College, London. I wrote Charnock but got no
reply. I mentioned this to Kraus, who suggested I go talk to Columbus Iselin, the
former WHOI Director. Iselin said he thought I should go to the meeting. He picked
up the phone and told Henry Behrens, the WHOI comptroller, to arrange it! Richard
Goody and Allan Robinson, who ran the program I was enrolled in at Harvard, were
surprised to see me in London. They had brought Stan Jacobs and Victor Barcilon to
the meeting, and did not expect any other Harvard students. I had a great two weeks in
London and learned some basics of air–sea interaction and ocean circulation. During
the 1962–1963 school year I completed my graduate course requirements.
In 1963 Henry Stommel decided to move to MIT, and I decided to stay at
Harvard. I felt comfortable there, and the Committee on Applied Mathematics only
required reading knowledge of one foreign language. I already knew enough German
to pass that requirement. So I switched to Allan Robinson as my adviser. I spent a
fair amount of time working on the computation of second-order nonlinear effects
for barotropic Rossby waves on a midlatitude beta plane. I stayed in Cambridge in
the summer of 1964 but Allan Robinson and Francis Bretherton both were at the
GFD course at WHOI. Bretherton gave a lecture on time-dependent motions near the
equator, and Robinson suggested to me that I investigate the baroclinic waves on an
equatorial beta plane, with a view toward studying the nonlinear effects. So starting
in the fall of 1964 I began to work on equatorial waves. Rattray (1964), Blandford
(1966), Matsuno (1966), and Rattray and Charnell (1966) all published important
papers on the topic. Rattray and Charnell tried to find equatorial wave solutions in
a closed basin, and I was not satisfied with the approximations they used to obtain
their result. The focus of my thesis turned out to be how to construct wave solutions
in an equatorial basin bounded by eastern and western boundaries, but open to the
north and south. The modes I constructed all had energy propagating equatorward
from high latitudes on the western boundary and an equal energy flux going poleward
on the eastern boundary. Michael Longuet-Higgins was producing similar modes
on a sphere at the same time. For some reason I never looked at reflections off an