20
Francis Bretherton
It enabled an unprecedented view of the fine structure sampled during descent and
ascent, and electronic processing greatly reduced the load on skilled technicians that
was required for accurate salinity measurements. The instruments themselves were
commercially marketed, but because of reservations about calibration they were supplemented during the MODE field programs by a limited number of bottle samples
attached to the same cable. Although the dynamic heights needed for the scientific
analysis were relatively insensitive to the fine structure, the onboard readout proved
invaluable in adjusting operations from multiple ships in the light of the state of the
ocean at the time.
A fourth enabling innovation was a programmatic decision made within the
National Science Foundation to consider coordinated proposals from teams of Principal Investigators from several different institutions, and to review and support those
selected as an integrated whole. This recognized that some of the fundamental problems in oceanography required a range of talents and technical resources that were
beyond the reach of any one institution, and capabilities that could be sustained for
longer than the duration of a traditional grant. The IDOE was launched as an experiment to foster new approaches and the administrative arrangements to support them.
However, most important of all were the leadership and insights of Henry
Stommel himself. His gift for interpreting the data and complexities of ocean dynamics
in terms of simple mathematical models was an ongoing inspiration to young scientists
like me. Indeed a decade previously he and collaborators (e.g., Stommel and Arons,
1960) had developed a theory of the abyssal circulation in an ocean with a flat bottom
that was in direct contradiction to the observations of Swallow and Worthington.
Driven by a postulated widespread upwelling at the base of the main thermocline, a
geostrophically balanced circulation was linked to a deep western boundary current.
However, it too predicted speeds in the interior region of at most a few millimeters
per second.
The project he had in mind was in concept very straightforward, to saturate
a typical small area of open ocean with enough instrumentation to map the fields
of velocity and density, and to follow their evolution for long enough to assess the
dynamical balances that were controlling them. When he asked me to consider how
I might possibly contribute to a such a project my first thought was that I was a
meteorologist rather than an oceanographer, but my second thought was that the
relevant equations of motion were almost identical to those used in weather prediction
(indeed simpler because of the absence of cloud), and that perhaps approaches familiar
in the atmosphere might be applied to the ocean as well.
PREPARATION
Stommel assembled a team that included practitioners of a wide variety of observational techniques as well as a group of theoreticians committed to elucidating the
dynamics associated with the anticipated observational results. Besides the current
Francis Bretherton
It enabled an unprecedented view of the fine structure sampled during descent and
ascent, and electronic processing greatly reduced the load on skilled technicians that
was required for accurate salinity measurements. The instruments themselves were
commercially marketed, but because of reservations about calibration they were supplemented during the MODE field programs by a limited number of bottle samples
attached to the same cable. Although the dynamic heights needed for the scientific
analysis were relatively insensitive to the fine structure, the onboard readout proved
invaluable in adjusting operations from multiple ships in the light of the state of the
ocean at the time.
A fourth enabling innovation was a programmatic decision made within the
National Science Foundation to consider coordinated proposals from teams of Principal Investigators from several different institutions, and to review and support those
selected as an integrated whole. This recognized that some of the fundamental problems in oceanography required a range of talents and technical resources that were
beyond the reach of any one institution, and capabilities that could be sustained for
longer than the duration of a traditional grant. The IDOE was launched as an experiment to foster new approaches and the administrative arrangements to support them.
However, most important of all were the leadership and insights of Henry
Stommel himself. His gift for interpreting the data and complexities of ocean dynamics
in terms of simple mathematical models was an ongoing inspiration to young scientists
like me. Indeed a decade previously he and collaborators (e.g., Stommel and Arons,
1960) had developed a theory of the abyssal circulation in an ocean with a flat bottom
that was in direct contradiction to the observations of Swallow and Worthington.
Driven by a postulated widespread upwelling at the base of the main thermocline, a
geostrophically balanced circulation was linked to a deep western boundary current.
However, it too predicted speeds in the interior region of at most a few millimeters
per second.
The project he had in mind was in concept very straightforward, to saturate
a typical small area of open ocean with enough instrumentation to map the fields
of velocity and density, and to follow their evolution for long enough to assess the
dynamical balances that were controlling them. When he asked me to consider how
I might possibly contribute to a such a project my first thought was that I was a
meteorologist rather than an oceanographer, but my second thought was that the
relevant equations of motion were almost identical to those used in weather prediction
(indeed simpler because of the absence of cloud), and that perhaps approaches familiar
in the atmosphere might be applied to the ocean as well.
PREPARATION
Stommel assembled a team that included practitioners of a wide variety of observational techniques as well as a group of theoreticians committed to elucidating the
dynamics associated with the anticipated observational results. Besides the current