Reflections of an Equatorial Oceanographer
107
plates, and everybody’s scared they are going to use up all the gas. Then I see one
lonely individual, Arthur D. Little, who’s been hired by the National Data Buoy
Project, who is handing out questionnaires like, ‘Do you like your speedometer to be
calibrated in miles per hour or kilometers per hour?’ ” Some present-day concerns
are not new.
The MODE experiment was conducted successfully and on schedule, and involved six ships, two aircraft, our own radio station and data center on Bermuda, a
private phone system linking the Bermuda data center to Harvard, MIT, Yale, WHOI,
and Johns Hopkins, and a network of Xerox telecopiers that could transmit a page
in either 4 or 6 minutes. These were used to share data in near real time. There was
plenty of excitement. Eli Katz aboard the Chain forgot about the watch circle around
each subsurface mooring location, and steamed directly over one of Bob Heinmiller’s
moorings with his towed CTD instrument. He snagged the mooring with the towfish,
and could not get loose. So he called me at the command post in Bermuda and asked
for the release codes for Heinmiller’s acoustic release, so he could pop the mooring
and recover his towfish. Needless to say, Bob was not amused.
The main messages I came away from MODE with were that big science could
be a lot of fun, that it was important to invest resources in the development of new
instruments and techniques, and that while there was a significant role for theoreticians
in planning these experiments and interpreting the results, the people who actually
made the measurements needed to play the primary role. The other thing that I got
from the 2 years at MIT were a set of lasting friendships and collegial relationships
that substantially shaped the rest of my career. Ed Sarachik came to MIT to work with
Jule Charney, and sat in the office next to mine. Mark Cane, Antonio Moura, and Inez
Fung were all graduate students there at the time. Charney was working with George
Philander and others to try to design the GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE),
to be carried out in the summer of 1974. Charney asked Sarachik to build a theoretical
model of the tropical ocean, including the mixed layer and the undercurrent, to help
guide the design of GATE. Sarachik got hold of Lighthill’s 1969 paper on “Dynamic
Response of the Indian Ocean to the Onset of the Southwest Monsoon,” and as he read
it he started asking me questions about equatorial waves. He forced me to consider
the effect of a boundary on one side of the ocean basin or the other. This led me to
realize the fundamental difference between reflection of baroclinic equatorial waves
at western boundaries and at eastern boundaries. At a western boundary an incoming
wave of a given meridional mode number n can always be reflected by a finite set
of outgoing waves at mode number n or lower, plus a Kelvin or a mixed Rossby–
gravity (a.k.a. Yanai) wave. But at an eastern boundary the same is not true, because
equatorial Kelvin and Yanai waves only carry energy eastward. Therefore, reflections
at an eastern boundary involve higher meridional mode numbers, and eventually
include modes decaying to the west which result in energy propagating poleward
along the boundary at high latitudes.
The Lighthill paper had left out the Kelvin wave completely and as a result had
not gotten the western boundary response correct. The model that Sarachik started
107
plates, and everybody’s scared they are going to use up all the gas. Then I see one
lonely individual, Arthur D. Little, who’s been hired by the National Data Buoy
Project, who is handing out questionnaires like, ‘Do you like your speedometer to be
calibrated in miles per hour or kilometers per hour?’ ” Some present-day concerns
are not new.
The MODE experiment was conducted successfully and on schedule, and involved six ships, two aircraft, our own radio station and data center on Bermuda, a
private phone system linking the Bermuda data center to Harvard, MIT, Yale, WHOI,
and Johns Hopkins, and a network of Xerox telecopiers that could transmit a page
in either 4 or 6 minutes. These were used to share data in near real time. There was
plenty of excitement. Eli Katz aboard the Chain forgot about the watch circle around
each subsurface mooring location, and steamed directly over one of Bob Heinmiller’s
moorings with his towed CTD instrument. He snagged the mooring with the towfish,
and could not get loose. So he called me at the command post in Bermuda and asked
for the release codes for Heinmiller’s acoustic release, so he could pop the mooring
and recover his towfish. Needless to say, Bob was not amused.
The main messages I came away from MODE with were that big science could
be a lot of fun, that it was important to invest resources in the development of new
instruments and techniques, and that while there was a significant role for theoreticians
in planning these experiments and interpreting the results, the people who actually
made the measurements needed to play the primary role. The other thing that I got
from the 2 years at MIT were a set of lasting friendships and collegial relationships
that substantially shaped the rest of my career. Ed Sarachik came to MIT to work with
Jule Charney, and sat in the office next to mine. Mark Cane, Antonio Moura, and Inez
Fung were all graduate students there at the time. Charney was working with George
Philander and others to try to design the GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE),
to be carried out in the summer of 1974. Charney asked Sarachik to build a theoretical
model of the tropical ocean, including the mixed layer and the undercurrent, to help
guide the design of GATE. Sarachik got hold of Lighthill’s 1969 paper on “Dynamic
Response of the Indian Ocean to the Onset of the Southwest Monsoon,” and as he read
it he started asking me questions about equatorial waves. He forced me to consider
the effect of a boundary on one side of the ocean basin or the other. This led me to
realize the fundamental difference between reflection of baroclinic equatorial waves
at western boundaries and at eastern boundaries. At a western boundary an incoming
wave of a given meridional mode number n can always be reflected by a finite set
of outgoing waves at mode number n or lower, plus a Kelvin or a mixed Rossby–
gravity (a.k.a. Yanai) wave. But at an eastern boundary the same is not true, because
equatorial Kelvin and Yanai waves only carry energy eastward. Therefore, reflections
at an eastern boundary involve higher meridional mode numbers, and eventually
include modes decaying to the west which result in energy propagating poleward
along the boundary at high latitudes.
The Lighthill paper had left out the Kelvin wave completely and as a result had
not gotten the western boundary response correct. The model that Sarachik started