OK, well, sorry about
the slight glitch.
I'm very pleased to
introduce Dick Lindzen, who's
a professor emeritus at MIT.
He's held faculty positions at
Chicago and Harvard and MIT.
He's a world authority
in dynamical meteorology
with interesting climate,
planetary waves, monsoons,
planetary atmospheres--
a very long list.
And he's made some
seminal contributions
to propagation of internal
waves and gravity waves
in the atmosphere, atmospheric
tides, Hadley circulation.
OK.
What do you do with that?
And he also, of course, knew
Lorenz and Charney very well.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you, John.
Take my notes away.
In any event, it's a
pleasure being here,
and it's always a pleasure
to remember Jule and Ed.
It's hard to know what I can add
concerning atmospheric dynamics
to what's been already said,
but I'll give my gloss on it.
And you know, meteorology
as a scientific discipline--
at least at the theory end--
was traditionally divided
into dynamic and physical
meteorology.
I don't know why oceanography
put dynamic oceanography
as physical
oceanography, but those
are the quirks of history.
This is a picture of Jule.
We were friends and occasionally
went bicycling together.
But one of the tortures
I put friends to-- we
have a little studio in the
basement for taking portraits.
And I finally found this one.
As Joe remembers, we had a
house fire, so most of them
were lost.
But this one wasn't.
In any case, if one goes
back to the early period
before World War II,
this is a terrific book
I'd recommend to anyone for the
state of the art of meteorology
prior to World War II.
And you know, it's
actually very impressive.
And it has a lot of stuff
by great fluid dynamicists,
and the thermodynamics
is very good.
It displayed two
approaches, and I'm not
going to be very
precise about it.
But there was work on
meteorology by what I'd loosely
call fluid dynamicists,
people like not only Laplace,
but Lord Rayleigh Horace Lamb,
Ludwig Prantl, GI Taylor,
Theodore von Karman.
Interestingly, all
of these people
did contribute to
dynamic meteorology.
It was broadly understood as the
source of meaningful problems.
And then there were the
meteorologists, and by no means
a slouchy group.
I mean it's Vilhelm Bjerknes,
Sutcliffe, [INAUDIBLE],, Brunt,
who wrote this book, Rossby,
Bernhard Horwitz, so on.
And while the differences
were not all that great,
the dynamicists usually began
with the equations of motion
and systematically
applied approximations
appropriate to
specific phenomena.
The meteorologists typically
were more descriptive
and ad hoc in their approaches.
I'll come back to that.
Traditional meteorologists--
and one of them
has been mentioned
several times.
I was a little surprised,
but in the history
movies was Sverre Pettersen.
And he was almost
entirely taxonomic.
I mean, there was almost
no dynamical thinking
in the pictures he presented.
Go through some
specific examples,
but it probably doesn't pay.
At any rate, World War II was an
extraordinarily important event
for meteorology, apart
from world history.
It brought a lot of
people into meteorology.
And of course, as we've
seen, Charney and Lorenz
were among them.
But so, I would
argue, is a Eliassen,
Fjortoft, Norm Phillips.
There were some who didn't
stay in meteorology,
like Ken Arrow, who became a
Nobel laureate in economics.
But it turned out to
be useful training,
and he often referred to it.
At any rate, Jule
came to meteorology,
as you've heard several times,
via classical mathematical
analysis.
His advisors at UCLA, Vilhelm
Bjerknes and Jorgen Holmboe
brought him up pretty much
to the state of the art
in what was then
dynamic meteorology.
And Jule brought his
mathematical training
to bear on what was one
of the major problems
in dynamic
meteorology, the origin
of large-scale disturbances
that characterized weather.
It should be mentioned
that his advisor at UCLA
in the math
department, TY Thomas,
may also have been important.
I'm not sure of
this, but I think
this was the Thomas who did
the first numerical study
of the instability of
viscous shear flow,
the Orr-Sommerfeld problem.
Wasn't him?
That was a different Thomas.
OK.
In any event, he was
interested in these problems.
Jule's thesis on baroclinic
instability, in many respects,
represented a coming of
age of dynamic meteorology.
It occupied a whole issue of
the Journal of Meteorology.
At any rate-- where was I here?
Yeah.
This is it.
This is the issue.
It had a table of contents.
I mean, that's
unusual in an article.
But it had quite a
few things that were
interesting in that respect.
It included the math
that Joe mentioned.
And it was-- how shall I put it?
John Marshall looked for
this on a citation index,
and it has a huge
number of citations,
largely from the
mathematics community, which
is a little bit surprising.
But what I'd refer
you to, of course--
and this is what I
meant to speak on--
when Jule died, we did
prepare a memorial volume.
And I would suggest to
anyone who's interested--
there are a lot of materials
in this, including Joe's--
I don't know.
How would I characterize it?
His loving description of the
baroclinic instability paper.
But there are also
very nice reminiscences
by Norm Phillips, Ed Lorenz.
And there are, of course,
George Platzman's interviews,
which were terrific, that
you got all these insights
into how he looked at the
field, how he related to it.
At any rate, the article
brought Jule to star status
within meteorology.
He had shown that the
large-scale waves were
instabilities on the
basic vertical shear
of zonally averaged flow.
And as had been mentioned, of
course, in a rotating flow,
the shear and the horizontal
and the meridional temperature
gradient are proportional
to each other.
At any rate, his
approach was, I think,
pretty much sate of the art
hydrodynamic instability.
I'd refer you to Joe's
article in the memorial
volume for details on this.
And as has been
mentioned, the search
for baroclinic instability
was undertaken by at least
two other meteorologists.
Eady has been mentioned.
There was also Halvor
Solberg in Norway.
And I think it's interesting to
contrast the three approaches.
Solberg began by assuming
that the Norwegian polar front
theory was correct and
looked for the stability
of perturbations on sloping
frontal discontinuities.
Having assumed this to be
the appropriate question,
he made no further
significant approximations
and found himself with
a mathematical problem
that he could not solve.
Eady, by contrast,
made insightful
but ad hoc simplifications
that allowed
an almost trivial
solution in terms
of hyperbolic sines, cosines.
Charney systematically
approximated equations
for a perturbation on
the smooth mean flow,
and this led to difficult
but solvable system that
furthermore offered a variety of
insights, not just a solution.
In this respect, Jule
was closer to the world
of the fluid dynamicists.
The situation was in fact
deeper than a simple difference
in approximations.
And here-- may be some
controversy on this.
But Eady's approach
suggested to many people
that baroclinic instability was
a kind of horizontal or slopey,
slantwise convection.
And I think that was misleading.
On the other side,
Charney and Stern in '62
showed that it was a variant
of the traditional hydrodynamic
plane parallel shear
flow instability.
And as Joe mentioned,
later work by Peter Stone
and Brian Hoskins showed that
baroclinic waves led to fronts
rather than the reverse.
Now, any reasonable discussion
of Charney's contributions
to meteorology will take a
lot more than 20 minutes,
but I'll give you a
few general remarks,
and again, I refer you to
the atmospheric challenge.
I think the first thing
we have to recognize
is that we are talking
about a very different era
from the present, both
for individual atmospheric
scientists and for
the department at MIT.
Now, if you look at a list
of Charney's publications,
you'll see that they amount
to about 60 publications.
And by today's standards,
that's a rather small number.
I remember discussing
this years ago with Joe,
and Joe quite
rightly pointed out,
when we were grad
students, the notion of one
or two papers a year
that were good should
be a reasonable amount.
Most of Charney's
self-initiated, as
opposed to invited,
papers focused
on explaining some specific
observationally-based question.
That may seem obvious,
but as we'll see,
it's not so true today.
They were attempts to
answer questions rather than
generalized studies.
I mean, this is a matter
of taste, perhaps.
The questions included
things ranging
from the mutual interaction
of hurricanes with convection,
to the explanation of
blocking, to desertification,
to Western concentration of
the Gulf Stream, et cetera.
Charney-- and this has
been mentioned already.
He was rarely defensive about
his attempted explanations.
It was interesting.
And I think he even
enjoyed criticism,
as long as it made sense.
I think it was also
during that period--
publications were regarded
as communications as opposed
to canonical statements.
Peer review was actually
new at that time.
It's a post-war
phenomenon, largely.
If you go back to
the 19th century
and read the papers by Kelvin
or someone, or even Lamb's book,
these are discussions.
Lord Rayleigh's
collected works, also.
You would imagine,
many of you, that you
would be looking at more formal
papers in that previous time.
Quite the reverse.
You're looking at conversations.
And that's quite remarkable.
Jule, as has been mentioned,
always encouraged others.
Almost always, Charney's papers
branched into other questions.
That was one of the
remarkable properties.
I think Jule was
primarily someone
who thought about the subject
in the following sense.
It was common for Jule to
use one paper to peripherally
present thoughts on
a variety of issues
that others would have
devoted many papers to.
Indeed, Charney's
papers were generally
the stimulus for many
papers by others,
and even papers that
were more general
had specific practical aims.
For instance, his paper on the
scales of atmospheric motions,
which developed the
quasi-geostrophic approximation
and in turn allowed
much progress
in dynamic meteorology,
I think, was
done to filter gravity
waves from the equation
so to enable early computers
to stably integrate
the relevant motions.
His lovely paper on
geostrophic turbulence
explained why turbulence in
a quasi-geostrophic system
was actually closer to
two-dimensional turbulence
than three-dimensional
turbulence
and allowed upscale
cascade, as opposed
to the expected downscale
that was made famous
by LF Richardson's doggerel.
I think most of you know these
big whorls have little whorls
that feed on their velocity.
Little whorls have lesser
whorls and so on, to viscosity.
As we've seen, the little
whorls work their way up
in geophysics.
Ray discussed yesterday-- and
this is one of the last things
I'll come to--
that perhaps Jule would
have loved exoplanets.
I suspect that Ray is
right, Ray [INAUDIBLE]..
But at least judging from
the motivation of one
of Charney's most
important papers,
his paper with Drazin in '61--
what was the basis for that
paper that he always stated?
It was that his good
friend from Princeton,
the French astrophysicist
Evry Schatzman,
had proposed the
dissipation of waves
propagating from below as a
cause for the solar corona.
And Jule was curious as to
why the large-scale waves so
prominent in the
troposphere did not
produce a corona in
the Earth's atmosphere.
This will be interesting
both for its successes
and for its failures,
in some ways.
It led Jule, first of all, to
become one of the first people
to describe vertically
propagating Rossby waves.
And this doesn't seem like
such a novelty today, almost.
Noting that such waves
could not penetrate regions
of easterly flow provided
an immediate explanation
why the extratropical
stratosphere is azonal only
in winter.
In any event, the
study also explained
why the winter
stratosphere is dominated
by wave numbers one and two.
And in considering the
origin of such waves,
the paper offered
a coherent argument
for why orographic forcing is
more important than thermal
forcing in the production
of stationary waves,
a question that is still one
which produces much confusion.
Finally, they completed the
work of Eliassen and Palm
by showing why and
under what conditions
stationary waves satisfied
the non-interaction theorem.
The non-interaction of
internal Rossby waves
is in fact commonly referred to
as the Charney-Drazin theorem,
but it's sometimes subsumed
under Eliassen-Palm.
However, Bob Dickinson
showed some years later
that Charney and
Drazin failed to show
that internal Rossby waves could
not reach the upper atmosphere.
And it was still later shown
by myself and Mark Schoeberl
that internal Rossby waves--
non-linear saturation
would prevent
there becoming a corona.
Jule was very much the ideal
citizen of meteorology.
He played a major role in
initiating numerical modeling.
And we've gone through
many of these things.
We've gone through his
role in BOMEX, GATE, Figgy.
And this shouldn't
be surprising.
Charney, I think,
said to Platzman
that a major reason for his
move from Princeton to MIT
was not just that
von Neumann was dead,
but he was motivated
by the presence
of a large observational
effort at MIT.
He was very supportive
of what we were doing
at Harvard during the '70s.
He and his students at MIT,
and students at MIT in general,
were central to the success of
our Tuesday evening seminars.
We met at a Chinese
restaurant and went
to have a seminar
and discussions,
and there was no time
limit on the discussions.
He also played a major role
in the MIT Woods Hole Harvard
seminars.
And while these sometimes
focused on things
that today are of no interest,
like why did Benard convection
form hexagons,
they also included
the early presentations
of Lorenz's work.
This brings me back to the final
comment on the very difference
between that period and today's.
At the time, I mean,
there were only
a handful of active
departments of meteorology,
and MIT'S was
clearly preeminent.
There was absolutely
no question I knew.
Charney, Lorenz, and Phillips
constituted a powerhouse
in dynamical meteorology, but
also Starr, Sanders, Newell,
constituted a powerful
presence in data analysis.
You also had radar meteorology,
people working on instruments.
There was also
close relation with
the experimental
fluid dynamicists
who were then in the separate
Earth and Planetary Sciences
department.
It's not mentioned,
but Ray Hide was
in that department for a while.
So was Erik Mollo-Christensen.
And then there were
the connections
with the mathematics
department--
I mean, people like Harvey
Greenspan, Willem Malkus, David
Benny, Lou Howard, CC Lin, Joe
Pedlosky, KK Tung, et cetera,
all of whom were deeply involved
in the problems of rotating
flows, convection,
hydrodynamic instability.
The geophysical fluid
dynamics, at times,
seemed to be at the forefront
of applied mathematics at MIT.
There were several groups
at private centers as well.
There's the Air
Force that regularly
participated in MIT'S seminars.
One would moreover
be remiss if one
didn't mention Henry Houghton.
You know, he was not, I
think, in the same league.
He did cover radar and
some radiative transfer.
MIT students often
registered at Harvard
for Richard Goody's course
in radiative transfer.
Students at Harvard often
took dynamics at MIT.
Cross registration was easy.
But when as chairman
of MIT'S department,
he was extraordinarily
successful in building up
the department.
And sometimes not mentioned,
but he also played a major role
in the creation of NCAR,
the National Center
for Atmospheric Research.
Today there are many
departments dealing
with the atmospheric
and oceanic sciences.
But the emphasis tends to be not
so much on specific phenomena,
but you know, for instance,
the role of climate--
putative climate change.
Studies are, I think when I
look at the journals, far more
common today than
explicit problem-solving.
MIT itself has a
very small effort
in observational meteorology.
And analysis is much more
likely to be of model outputs
than of actual data.
On the more positive
side, the absorption
of meteorology and
oceanography into what is now
the Department of Earth,
Atmospheric, and Planetary
Sciences is now unified in
the large oceanographic work.
On the other hand, relations
with fluid dynamicists
and the rest of MIT have
been significantly reduced,
as have GFD activities
in the math department.
So have interactions
with other institutions.
Part of the reason is
that academic scientists
have to spend much more of
their time raising funds.
For many years, meteorology
was supported at MIT
by group grants
that were renewed
on the basis of site visits.
I mean, paperwork was much less.
There was a certain
leisureliness
that was implicit in
the close interactions
with Harvard and the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution,
and that leisureliness
is now much diminished
and undervalued.
How all this will
work out in the future
is, of course, hard to tell.
But fortunately, there
remain many crucial problems
to be solved in
atmospheric dynamics,
leaving much for future Charneys
and Lorenzes to work on.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
