16
Francis Bretherton
DISCLAIMER
This account is based upon personal and fragmentary memories of a brief period
(1970–1973) of intensive involvement by an applied mathematician with no formal
training in oceanography. Few written records remain that are readily available to me
and my recall has become more selective with age. The perspective is also unavoidably
colored by a subsequent 3 decades of exposure to issues of climate change and
the interactions of humans with our global environment. This later experience of
“big science” as a way of life, superimposed on huge changes in technology and
instrumentation, makes it difficult to wind back the scientific and interpersonal context
to the MODE era in an objective manner. However, it is just this difficulty that makes
the attempt worthwhile.
BACKGROUND
Following a Ph.D. in Fluid Dynamics from the Department of Applied Mathematics
and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge in England, I spent
a postdoctoral year (1961–62) visiting C.C. Lin’s group in the Mathematics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sitting in on a course of lectures
by George Veronis on Ocean Circulation, I had my first introduction to concepts
such as Ekman layers, the level of no motion, and the Stommel model of western
boundary currents. It was far from my area of specialization (classical fluid dynamics
at low Reynolds number), but planted a seed that grew way beyond expectations.
Later that year, responding to an opportunity created by George Batchelor at
DAMTP, I returned to Cambridge with a commitment to research in Dynamical Meteorology, as part of a new group focusing on atmosphere and ocean dynamics. For
the first year my colleague in this endeavor was Owen Phillips, who later wrote the
textbook Dynamics of the Upper Ocean. However, for me the first priority had to be
mastering my new subject area! Nevertheless, the contact with George Veronis was
invaluable, and at his invitation two summers (1963, 1964) were spent at the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution, participating in the Summer Program in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) in Walsh Cottage. Supported over many years by the
National Science Foundation, this GFD program was highly influential in educating
and recruiting graduate students and junior faculty into a burgeoning field. I certainly
count myself in this category. Interaction with John Booker, one of the students in
the program, gave rise to the concept of critical layer absorption for internal gravity
waves in a shear flow (Booker and Bretherton, 1967), which became a substantial
early contribution to my new field of research. Although my primary concerns were
in the atmosphere, the equations of motion for a stratified fluid on a rotating earth were
the same for both media (and indeed even within the sun), and it seemed that, given
adjustment of space and time scales and appropriate observational tools, many phenomena should translate between them. It also should be noted that the intellectual
Francis Bretherton
DISCLAIMER
This account is based upon personal and fragmentary memories of a brief period
(1970–1973) of intensive involvement by an applied mathematician with no formal
training in oceanography. Few written records remain that are readily available to me
and my recall has become more selective with age. The perspective is also unavoidably
colored by a subsequent 3 decades of exposure to issues of climate change and
the interactions of humans with our global environment. This later experience of
“big science” as a way of life, superimposed on huge changes in technology and
instrumentation, makes it difficult to wind back the scientific and interpersonal context
to the MODE era in an objective manner. However, it is just this difficulty that makes
the attempt worthwhile.
BACKGROUND
Following a Ph.D. in Fluid Dynamics from the Department of Applied Mathematics
and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge in England, I spent
a postdoctoral year (1961–62) visiting C.C. Lin’s group in the Mathematics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sitting in on a course of lectures
by George Veronis on Ocean Circulation, I had my first introduction to concepts
such as Ekman layers, the level of no motion, and the Stommel model of western
boundary currents. It was far from my area of specialization (classical fluid dynamics
at low Reynolds number), but planted a seed that grew way beyond expectations.
Later that year, responding to an opportunity created by George Batchelor at
DAMTP, I returned to Cambridge with a commitment to research in Dynamical Meteorology, as part of a new group focusing on atmosphere and ocean dynamics. For
the first year my colleague in this endeavor was Owen Phillips, who later wrote the
textbook Dynamics of the Upper Ocean. However, for me the first priority had to be
mastering my new subject area! Nevertheless, the contact with George Veronis was
invaluable, and at his invitation two summers (1963, 1964) were spent at the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution, participating in the Summer Program in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) in Walsh Cottage. Supported over many years by the
National Science Foundation, this GFD program was highly influential in educating
and recruiting graduate students and junior faculty into a burgeoning field. I certainly
count myself in this category. Interaction with John Booker, one of the students in
the program, gave rise to the concept of critical layer absorption for internal gravity
waves in a shear flow (Booker and Bretherton, 1967), which became a substantial
early contribution to my new field of research. Although my primary concerns were
in the atmosphere, the equations of motion for a stratified fluid on a rotating earth were
the same for both media (and indeed even within the sun), and it seemed that, given
adjustment of space and time scales and appropriate observational tools, many phenomena should translate between them. It also should be noted that the intellectual