108
Dennis Wilson Moore
to develop was eventually handed off to Mark Cane to complete. He and Sarachik
wrote a comprehensive series of papers on barotropic and baroclinic disturbances,
with special attention to the equatorial wave guide.
Before I left MIT Henry Stommel asked me if I could assemble a group of
equatorial theoreticians to think about possible experiments in the Indian Ocean. I
got Dick Lindzen, George Philander, and Ed Sarachik to agree to serve on the INDEX
Theoretical Panel.
I returned from MIT to Nova in the fall of 1973. George Philander contacted
me and asked if I could come to Paris for a meeting at IOC to help plan GATE
oceanography. I stopped in Boston on the way and went to Woods Hole to see Henry
Stommel. Michelle Fieux was there visiting as well, and one evening she and Stommel
used a sextant to measure the angular separation between two stellar objects while I
was given the ephemeris and nautical almanac from which to calculate the theoretical
answer. The results agreed to within the error of the sextant observation, much to our
pleasure. I also met with Mark Cane to get his ideas for GATE, because he could not
go to Paris. The airport at Boston was full of troops when I left for Paris, as a war had
just broken out between Israel and the Arabs. The meeting in Paris was great fun. The
participants were an interesting, enthusiatic group. They included John Knauss and a
couple of his students, Walter Duing from Miami, Philip Rowlands, and a significant
contingent of both East and West Germans, as well as a few Russians. One morning I
opened the Herald-Tribune to see that U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew had resigned.
I told Knauss there was a job for him in Washington, but he was not interested. He
later became the NOAA Administrator under George H.W. Bush.
In terms of planning for some oceanography at the equator, we decided GATE
should concentrate on the undercurrent, which was the only significant feature we
knew anything about. The meteorologists primarily wanted the oceanographic vessels
as observational platforms for the atmosphere, and had no strong ideas about what
oceanography we should do. We laid out an observational plan that involved a zigzag
pattern as the ships steamed along the equator, to allow monitoring the position of
the undercurrent and lowering current profilers through it. By the time the experiment
was actually run, the transects were done in the opposite direction from what we had
suggested, and the mean core of the undercurrent was observed to be some distance
off the equator. There were also significant fluctuations of a biweekly time scale (see
Duing et al., 1975).
The year I came back from MIT to Nova, Niiler and I wrote up our Gulf
Stream separation model and submitted it to George Veronis for the Journal of Marine
Research. He accepted it for publication the day we submitted it. The work involved
a complicated sequence of nested boundary layers. I was rather proud of it, but
Carl Wunsch later cited it as an example of “analytic models . . . which . . . seemed
untestable and intuitively implausible outside the laboratory.” I still like to work on
problems of this sort (see Moore and Niiler, 1974, and Wunsch, 1981).
In the spring of 1974 Henry Stommel came to Miami to meet with Walter
Duing, Ants Leetmaa, and me, to plan an Indian Ocean program (INDEX) to propose
Dennis Wilson Moore
to develop was eventually handed off to Mark Cane to complete. He and Sarachik
wrote a comprehensive series of papers on barotropic and baroclinic disturbances,
with special attention to the equatorial wave guide.
Before I left MIT Henry Stommel asked me if I could assemble a group of
equatorial theoreticians to think about possible experiments in the Indian Ocean. I
got Dick Lindzen, George Philander, and Ed Sarachik to agree to serve on the INDEX
Theoretical Panel.
I returned from MIT to Nova in the fall of 1973. George Philander contacted
me and asked if I could come to Paris for a meeting at IOC to help plan GATE
oceanography. I stopped in Boston on the way and went to Woods Hole to see Henry
Stommel. Michelle Fieux was there visiting as well, and one evening she and Stommel
used a sextant to measure the angular separation between two stellar objects while I
was given the ephemeris and nautical almanac from which to calculate the theoretical
answer. The results agreed to within the error of the sextant observation, much to our
pleasure. I also met with Mark Cane to get his ideas for GATE, because he could not
go to Paris. The airport at Boston was full of troops when I left for Paris, as a war had
just broken out between Israel and the Arabs. The meeting in Paris was great fun. The
participants were an interesting, enthusiatic group. They included John Knauss and a
couple of his students, Walter Duing from Miami, Philip Rowlands, and a significant
contingent of both East and West Germans, as well as a few Russians. One morning I
opened the Herald-Tribune to see that U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew had resigned.
I told Knauss there was a job for him in Washington, but he was not interested. He
later became the NOAA Administrator under George H.W. Bush.
In terms of planning for some oceanography at the equator, we decided GATE
should concentrate on the undercurrent, which was the only significant feature we
knew anything about. The meteorologists primarily wanted the oceanographic vessels
as observational platforms for the atmosphere, and had no strong ideas about what
oceanography we should do. We laid out an observational plan that involved a zigzag
pattern as the ships steamed along the equator, to allow monitoring the position of
the undercurrent and lowering current profilers through it. By the time the experiment
was actually run, the transects were done in the opposite direction from what we had
suggested, and the mean core of the undercurrent was observed to be some distance
off the equator. There were also significant fluctuations of a biweekly time scale (see
Duing et al., 1975).
The year I came back from MIT to Nova, Niiler and I wrote up our Gulf
Stream separation model and submitted it to George Veronis for the Journal of Marine
Research. He accepted it for publication the day we submitted it. The work involved
a complicated sequence of nested boundary layers. I was rather proud of it, but
Carl Wunsch later cited it as an example of “analytic models . . . which . . . seemed
untestable and intuitively implausible outside the laboratory.” I still like to work on
problems of this sort (see Moore and Niiler, 1974, and Wunsch, 1981).
In the spring of 1974 Henry Stommel came to Miami to meet with Walter
Duing, Ants Leetmaa, and me, to plan an Indian Ocean program (INDEX) to propose