148
Joseph Pedlosky
Christmas of 1981 was approaching and I took upon myself the task of preparing
a manuscript describing our theory to which Jim added a good section describing what
observational evidence could be mustered in its support. I wrote the paper at high
speed, longhand in those days, and my consistent misspelling of the word “ventilated”
(I was overly generous with the number of l
s) was a source of amusement to both Hank
and Jim. I mischievously included an allusion to the Communist Manifesto, so subtle
that no one has ever remarked on it to me.
5 A sometime tradition at Woods Hole was the
Christmas GFD seminar in which serious work was presented with a humorous touch.
Melvin Stern once gave it dressed as Santa. We were eager to present our work for the
first time in that forum. Nancy Copley prepared a wonderfully witty announcement
(see the Christmas Appendix) and Jim and I presented the observational and theoretical
parts of the work with Hank squirming nervously in the audience. To finish off the
seminar I had borrowed from a local theater company that was putting on a Christmas
performance of Amahl and the Night Visitors three kingly crowns and rewrote the
lyrics to a well-known carol called, for the seminar, “We Three Kings of Geostrophy
Are” (see the Appendix) and to our amazement we succeeded in persuading Hank,
always reluctant to perform in public, to join us in the singing. Fortunately, a member
of the audience had a camera and the amazing moment is captured for posterity and
is shown in the Appendix.
We were in high spirits. While I was drafting the paper Hank would drop by
from time to time to discuss the work and the paper and once remarked with quiet
satisfaction, “No one will ever think about the thermocline the same way again.” It
was not a boast but a sense of serious accomplishment he expressed and the three of us
felt very close. We submitted the paper and naturally obtained lukewarm reviews but
the paper was nevertheless accepted for publication. When the galley proofs were sent
to me for correction I remember working on them one Saturday night and feeling very
content with the paper and the work. The contentment was of short duration. Early
the following morning the phone rang and it was Hank. “Have you seen Killworth’s
article in Ocean Modelling?” My reply was “no” and Hank said that although our
paper was not yet published it was already being criticized but he was not sure of
the basis. He said he would come right over and when I invited him in for a cup
of coffee he nervously thrust the issue of O.M. into my hands and said, “Here, you
take care of this” and rushed away. The substance of the article’s argument was that
any ideal-fluid thermocline model that allowed a nonzero stratification on the eastern
boundary had to be entirely at rest to be consistent with the adiabatic, geostrophic
equations. Our ventilated model with a nonzero thickness of the lowest layer on the
eastern boundary was, therefore, somehow incorrect if it allowed any motion at all.
The result was based on an ingenious theorem of Killworth’s that used a Taylor series
expansion of all variables from the eastern boundary and the equations to prove that
all velocities were zero on the eastern boundary unless the stratification was zero, and
5 “A . . . conceptual difficulty . . . haunts the history of the thermocline problem.”
Joseph Pedlosky
Christmas of 1981 was approaching and I took upon myself the task of preparing
a manuscript describing our theory to which Jim added a good section describing what
observational evidence could be mustered in its support. I wrote the paper at high
speed, longhand in those days, and my consistent misspelling of the word “ventilated”
(I was overly generous with the number of l
s) was a source of amusement to both Hank
and Jim. I mischievously included an allusion to the Communist Manifesto, so subtle
that no one has ever remarked on it to me.
5 A sometime tradition at Woods Hole was the
Christmas GFD seminar in which serious work was presented with a humorous touch.
Melvin Stern once gave it dressed as Santa. We were eager to present our work for the
first time in that forum. Nancy Copley prepared a wonderfully witty announcement
(see the Christmas Appendix) and Jim and I presented the observational and theoretical
parts of the work with Hank squirming nervously in the audience. To finish off the
seminar I had borrowed from a local theater company that was putting on a Christmas
performance of Amahl and the Night Visitors three kingly crowns and rewrote the
lyrics to a well-known carol called, for the seminar, “We Three Kings of Geostrophy
Are” (see the Appendix) and to our amazement we succeeded in persuading Hank,
always reluctant to perform in public, to join us in the singing. Fortunately, a member
of the audience had a camera and the amazing moment is captured for posterity and
is shown in the Appendix.
We were in high spirits. While I was drafting the paper Hank would drop by
from time to time to discuss the work and the paper and once remarked with quiet
satisfaction, “No one will ever think about the thermocline the same way again.” It
was not a boast but a sense of serious accomplishment he expressed and the three of us
felt very close. We submitted the paper and naturally obtained lukewarm reviews but
the paper was nevertheless accepted for publication. When the galley proofs were sent
to me for correction I remember working on them one Saturday night and feeling very
content with the paper and the work. The contentment was of short duration. Early
the following morning the phone rang and it was Hank. “Have you seen Killworth’s
article in Ocean Modelling?” My reply was “no” and Hank said that although our
paper was not yet published it was already being criticized but he was not sure of
the basis. He said he would come right over and when I invited him in for a cup
of coffee he nervously thrust the issue of O.M. into my hands and said, “Here, you
take care of this” and rushed away. The substance of the article’s argument was that
any ideal-fluid thermocline model that allowed a nonzero stratification on the eastern
boundary had to be entirely at rest to be consistent with the adiabatic, geostrophic
equations. Our ventilated model with a nonzero thickness of the lowest layer on the
eastern boundary was, therefore, somehow incorrect if it allowed any motion at all.
The result was based on an ingenious theorem of Killworth’s that used a Taylor series
expansion of all variables from the eastern boundary and the equations to prove that
all velocities were zero on the eastern boundary unless the stratification was zero, and
5 “A . . . conceptual difficulty . . . haunts the history of the thermocline problem.”