68
J. S. Godfrey
laboratory called the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
(CSIRO); I was given a year’s Post-Doc at Harvard University, to learn what an
ocean was. I had a wonderful time discovering how strange, counterintuitive, and
challenging the physics of our oceans can be.
My new boss, Bruce Hamon, had discovered the eddies in the East Australian
Current; he recognized that theoretical skills were needed to interpret what he had
seen. He had somehow hired three people—George Cresswell, David Webb, and
myself—to fill one job, a feat he never explained to us. He wanted to give us the feel
of what he had found, so he taught us all how to create dynamic height maps using
Nansen bottles. Latitudes and longitudes in those days came from the ship’s officers’
fixes on sun and stars. After a few days in cloudy conditions, in a slow ship in complex,
rapid currents, these were often out by 60 miles, or more than an eddy diameter. A
month’s work at sea was often followed by several months ashore, unraveling what
we had seen (and where). Recently I talked about this to some students, and about
how such maps can now be made almost as well at a press of a button on the latest
altimeter data. Their reaction told me that I was old enough to have been part of
history for them, a rather sobering experience.
TROPICAL OCEANS–GLOBAL ATMOSPHERE
Stories filtered through to Cronulla (my new home, a suburb of Sydney) that the
sea levels and wind systems of the entire tropical Pacific could change drastically
from one year to the next, along with the exciting idea (Bjerknes, 1969) that this
might involve a positive feedback between the ocean and atmosphere—the El Ni˜ no–
Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. Neville Nicholls, an Australian meteorologist, suggested that ENSO events might start in Indonesia, just to our north
[despite the fact that the dramatic ENSO signal in Sea Surface Temperature (SST) occurred in the eastern Pacific, over 10,000 km away]. This suggested opportunity to an
Australian oceanographer like me; and so it proved. The 10-year Tropical OceanGlobal Atmosphere (TOGA) program was being planned and then implemented.
I was invited to join the international Scientific Steering Group of TOGA, which
provided a wonderful chance to meet with meteorologists and oceanographers from
around the world.
Peter Webster and Roger Lukas—the guiding lights of the TOGA scientific
steering group, once it was under way—recognized that the basic 10-year monitoring
strategy that had been adopted for TOGA needed to be supplemented by a more intensive field observation experiment. This was to be a 4-month study of what happens
when Madden–Julian Oscillations (periods of several weeks of enhanced westerly
wind stress, thought to be possible precursors of ENSO) moved eastward out of Indonesia. It was considered particularly important to quantitatively track the air–sea
heat fluxes which caused SST to change. Webster and Lukas organized a successful
appeal to the U.S. Congress to finance the massive U.S. component of this ambitious
J. S. Godfrey
laboratory called the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
(CSIRO); I was given a year’s Post-Doc at Harvard University, to learn what an
ocean was. I had a wonderful time discovering how strange, counterintuitive, and
challenging the physics of our oceans can be.
My new boss, Bruce Hamon, had discovered the eddies in the East Australian
Current; he recognized that theoretical skills were needed to interpret what he had
seen. He had somehow hired three people—George Cresswell, David Webb, and
myself—to fill one job, a feat he never explained to us. He wanted to give us the feel
of what he had found, so he taught us all how to create dynamic height maps using
Nansen bottles. Latitudes and longitudes in those days came from the ship’s officers’
fixes on sun and stars. After a few days in cloudy conditions, in a slow ship in complex,
rapid currents, these were often out by 60 miles, or more than an eddy diameter. A
month’s work at sea was often followed by several months ashore, unraveling what
we had seen (and where). Recently I talked about this to some students, and about
how such maps can now be made almost as well at a press of a button on the latest
altimeter data. Their reaction told me that I was old enough to have been part of
history for them, a rather sobering experience.
TROPICAL OCEANS–GLOBAL ATMOSPHERE
Stories filtered through to Cronulla (my new home, a suburb of Sydney) that the
sea levels and wind systems of the entire tropical Pacific could change drastically
from one year to the next, along with the exciting idea (Bjerknes, 1969) that this
might involve a positive feedback between the ocean and atmosphere—the El Ni˜ no–
Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. Neville Nicholls, an Australian meteorologist, suggested that ENSO events might start in Indonesia, just to our north
[despite the fact that the dramatic ENSO signal in Sea Surface Temperature (SST) occurred in the eastern Pacific, over 10,000 km away]. This suggested opportunity to an
Australian oceanographer like me; and so it proved. The 10-year Tropical OceanGlobal Atmosphere (TOGA) program was being planned and then implemented.
I was invited to join the international Scientific Steering Group of TOGA, which
provided a wonderful chance to meet with meteorologists and oceanographers from
around the world.
Peter Webster and Roger Lukas—the guiding lights of the TOGA scientific
steering group, once it was under way—recognized that the basic 10-year monitoring
strategy that had been adopted for TOGA needed to be supplemented by a more intensive field observation experiment. This was to be a 4-month study of what happens
when Madden–Julian Oscillations (periods of several weeks of enhanced westerly
wind stress, thought to be possible precursors of ENSO) moved eastward out of Indonesia. It was considered particularly important to quantitatively track the air–sea
heat fluxes which caused SST to change. Webster and Lukas organized a successful
appeal to the U.S. Congress to finance the massive U.S. component of this ambitious