112
Dennis Wilson Moore
that UNOLS adopted after the loss of the Gulfstream. Subsequently UNOLS adopted
a separate set of standards and procedures for charter vessels. Unfortunately, all of
this illustrates that oceanographers are no better than anyone else at learning from
their mistakes. It often takes more than one.
In March 1979 I moved to Hawaii and became the JIMAR Director. The FGGE
fieldwork was already underway, and we were busy planning what to do next. A
group who wanted to have a detailed look at the equatorial waveguide proposed an
experiment called PEQUOD, which stood for Pacific EQUatorial Ocean Dynamics.
Jim Baker, then at the University of Washington (UW), and I were the cochairmen
for this program, and in early June we put together a cover document to accompany
the proposals. Shortly thereafter Jay McCreary arrived in Hawaii for a summer visit
at JIMAR, and he and I immediately set about reworking the document. We had Jan
Witte come out from Nova to help us. The cover documents were FEDEXed to NSF
in time to be there by the July 1 deadline, only FEDEX lost the shipment. So we had
to produce another set of copies the following week, and this time we shipped them to
Baker in Seattle, to hand carry to Washington. The program was eventually funded,
but Baker’s project was not, so he dropped out. Jim Luyten at WHOI became the other
cochairman, and Bob Heinmiller at MIT took on the coordination responsibilities.
Bob soon realized that the time difference between Honolulu and Boston was going
to make communication difficult, and he contracted with GTE to set up a network
using GTE TELEMAIL. We all got terminals that the phone could be connected to,
and we had the equivalent of email a decade before the Internet became available.
Heinmiller eventually took the system private and set up OMNET.
In December 1979 Jay and I attended the IUGG meeting in Canberra. Afterward we traveled with Rana Fine through New Zealand, Samoa, and Fiji. Jay and
I concentrated on planning for the meeting of SCOR WG 47, to review what had
been learned during FGGE. He also explained the ideas about the delayed oscillator
theory for ENSO that he and David Anderson had been working on (McCreary and
Anderson, 1984). The SCOR WG 47 meeting was held in Venice in April 1981. Jay
was convener, and wore a jacket and tie! It was a memorable meeting. Some of the
equatorial theoreticians had been having a disagreement, and the key words were
“gullible” versus “skeptical”. The argument had to do with sea level variability in
the Gulf of Guinea and whether the cause was more likely to be a linear response to
zonal wind variations in the western equatorial Atlantic or a nonlinear response to
meridional winds in the eastern equatorial Atlantic. At some point during the week
in Venice the theoreticians sat down at an outdoor caf´ e to work out a truce, but when
Fritz Schott asked if he could join the discussion he was refused! The SCOR WG47
meeting results were summarized in Recent Progress in Equatorial Oceanography,
edited by McCreary, Moore, and Witte, which appeared in December 1981.
The PEQUOD program took place starting in March 1982 and extended into
1983. It turned out to coincide with a major El Ni˜ no whose timing did not follow the
accepted norm. So at a meeting at Princeton in the fall of 1982 we had a temperature
record from Fanning Island showing the highest SST ever recorded there, and yet no
Dennis Wilson Moore
that UNOLS adopted after the loss of the Gulfstream. Subsequently UNOLS adopted
a separate set of standards and procedures for charter vessels. Unfortunately, all of
this illustrates that oceanographers are no better than anyone else at learning from
their mistakes. It often takes more than one.
In March 1979 I moved to Hawaii and became the JIMAR Director. The FGGE
fieldwork was already underway, and we were busy planning what to do next. A
group who wanted to have a detailed look at the equatorial waveguide proposed an
experiment called PEQUOD, which stood for Pacific EQUatorial Ocean Dynamics.
Jim Baker, then at the University of Washington (UW), and I were the cochairmen
for this program, and in early June we put together a cover document to accompany
the proposals. Shortly thereafter Jay McCreary arrived in Hawaii for a summer visit
at JIMAR, and he and I immediately set about reworking the document. We had Jan
Witte come out from Nova to help us. The cover documents were FEDEXed to NSF
in time to be there by the July 1 deadline, only FEDEX lost the shipment. So we had
to produce another set of copies the following week, and this time we shipped them to
Baker in Seattle, to hand carry to Washington. The program was eventually funded,
but Baker’s project was not, so he dropped out. Jim Luyten at WHOI became the other
cochairman, and Bob Heinmiller at MIT took on the coordination responsibilities.
Bob soon realized that the time difference between Honolulu and Boston was going
to make communication difficult, and he contracted with GTE to set up a network
using GTE TELEMAIL. We all got terminals that the phone could be connected to,
and we had the equivalent of email a decade before the Internet became available.
Heinmiller eventually took the system private and set up OMNET.
In December 1979 Jay and I attended the IUGG meeting in Canberra. Afterward we traveled with Rana Fine through New Zealand, Samoa, and Fiji. Jay and
I concentrated on planning for the meeting of SCOR WG 47, to review what had
been learned during FGGE. He also explained the ideas about the delayed oscillator
theory for ENSO that he and David Anderson had been working on (McCreary and
Anderson, 1984). The SCOR WG 47 meeting was held in Venice in April 1981. Jay
was convener, and wore a jacket and tie! It was a memorable meeting. Some of the
equatorial theoreticians had been having a disagreement, and the key words were
“gullible” versus “skeptical”. The argument had to do with sea level variability in
the Gulf of Guinea and whether the cause was more likely to be a linear response to
zonal wind variations in the western equatorial Atlantic or a nonlinear response to
meridional winds in the eastern equatorial Atlantic. At some point during the week
in Venice the theoreticians sat down at an outdoor caf´ e to work out a truce, but when
Fritz Schott asked if he could join the discussion he was refused! The SCOR WG47
meeting results were summarized in Recent Progress in Equatorial Oceanography,
edited by McCreary, Moore, and Witte, which appeared in December 1981.
The PEQUOD program took place starting in March 1982 and extended into
1983. It turned out to coincide with a major El Ni˜ no whose timing did not follow the
accepted norm. So at a meeting at Princeton in the fall of 1982 we had a temperature
record from Fanning Island showing the highest SST ever recorded there, and yet no