Jule Charney's Influence on Meteorology'
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Jule Charney's Influence Norman A. Phillips National Weather Service, NOAA on Meteorology' Washington, D.C. 20233 The opportunity to address the Society on the contributions of Jule Charney to our science is an honor of the highest rank, and I thank you for this invitation. I will try to capture for you a meaningful impression of the extent to which our common undertaking has been influenced by this man (Fig. 1). Let me begin by recalling three historical contexts. The first of these is January 1,1917. Jule is born on this day in San Francisco, to Stella and Ely Charney. Five thousand miles away in Bergen, Norway, Vilhelm Bjerknes and his collabor- ators are developing the concepts of fronts and air masses. Some distance south of Bergen, Lewis Richardson is trans- porting wounded soldiers with the Friends Ambulance Corps. In spare moments, he is working on his monumental formulation of what is now called numerical weather prediction. My second context is around 1940. Jule had entered the University of California at Los Angeles in the mid-thirties, and is now a graduate student there in mathematics. UCLA is expanding, and Jacob Bjerknes and Jrirgen Holmboe ar- rive about this time. (A few years earlier, Bjerknes had pub- lished an important paper on long waves. In 1939, while he was at M.I.T., Carl Rossby published his well known model FIG. 1. A picture of Jule Charney (left), with E. Lorenz, taken in of long waves. These events are unknown to Jule.) Jule 1976 during a visit by Chinese meteorologists to the Massachusetts knows nothing of meteorology until one day he hears a talk Institute of Technology. (Courtesy of E. Kalnay). by Holmboe to the mathematics students; he then accepts Holmboe's invitation to work in the meteorology department.2 Holmboe is not the only person we must thank for Jule's (bureaucratic and otherwise), and meteorologists (theoreti- commitment to meteorology, however. Perhaps prompted cal and applied) are engaged in this program to measure the by the seeming imminent entry of the United States in World atmosphere on a global scale. It has been preceded by several War II, Jule seeks advice from Theodore von Karman. preliminary experiments and countless planning studies, and Should he, for example, enter the field of aeronautics instead it is efficiently exploiting new technologies of observation of mathematics or meteorology? Von Karman recommends and data processing. It signifies a profound change since Jule meteorology as a challenging field, whereas aeronautics has first heard Holmboe mention meteorology at UCLA. become mostly engineering. This advice is especially impor- The title of my talk is "Jule Charney's Influence on Mete- tant to us, because Jule had already completed the essential orology." You will have a good over-all idea of this influence if part of a doctoral thesis in mathematics. I were to simply state that it was he who developed much of As my last point of historical context, I will jump 39 years the scientific insight that made this experiment a meaningful to 1979, two years before Jule's death. What is now taking thing to do; he who played the major role in its conception; place? It is, of course, the Global Weather Experiment. An helped convince responsible officials of its significance; and amazing number of countries (large and small), institutions worked hard on many of the planning studies. I suspect that each of us is occasionally angered by the randomness of prov- idence in the way people whom we respect and admire meet what seems to be an untimely death. In the case of Jule Char- 'Memorial Lecture presented at 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society, 11 January 1982, San Antonio, ney, we must temper any such regret by the realization that Tex. For information on the MIT symposium celebrating Jule Char- he did live to see this proof of his influence on meteorology. ney's contributions to atmospheric and oceanic sciences on 21 Everyone in this audience is familiar with the facts that March 1983, see announcement on p. 565 of this issue. there has been a Global Weather Experiment, that forecast- 21 am grateful to George Platzman and Jane McNabb for allowing ing nowadays begins with computer-based calculations, and me to listen to an interview that Platzman recorded with Jule in August 1980. This has been especially useful for my knowledge of that there is something called baroclinic instability. In the Jule's early life. remainder of my talk, I will try to give you a deeper feeling 492 Vol. 63, No. 5, May 1982 Unauthenticated | Downloaded 10/06/21 07:14 PM UTC Bulletin American Meteorological Society 493 for the style and substance of Jule's contributions to these Northwestern United States." It was a good paper, written and other developments. by Seymour Hess and Harold Wagner at the University of Jule's thesis was entitled "Dynamics of long waves in a Chicago, presumably under the aegis of Rossby. In their baroclinic westerly current." It took up the entire October paper, Hess and Wagner describe the motion of surface isallo- 1947 issue of the Journal of Meteorology. For the first time, baric patterns moving eastward into Montana. In a very per- this paper established a believable mechanism for the devel- ceptive analysis, they find that they must call most of these opment and motion of the large-scale disturbances in the at- patterns "fast waves," because they move much faster than mosphere. At that time, the disturbances were called simply the low-level winds from the Pacific. It is with a strong ac- "long waves." Their relation to surface cyclone waves was companying impression of astonishment that they record the not clear. The major study of atmospheric instabilities to be fact that westerly wind speeds matching this translational found then was in Physikalische Hydrodynamik, by V. pattern speed can often not be found below the 20000 foot Bjerknes and collaborators. Halvor Solberg, in this book and level! This fact, then so surprising in the heyday of the polar elsewhere, had attempted to show that the polar front cy- front cyclone model, is explained today by a casual reference clone arose as an unstable wave on the sloping frontal dis- to "the equivalent barotropic level." It was Jule, in his thesis, continuity surface. But the mathematical problem was very who first deduced a value for this level, and it was also his difficult. In his thesis, Jule, in the same way as Solberg, thesis that encouraged many of us to think of the atmosphere treated small perturbations on a basic state. But Jule's ap- as a three-dimensional system. proach differed from Solberg's in two fundamental and far- Jule's next effort was the formulation of the quasi-geo- reaching respects. First, Solberg viewed with suspicion any strophic equations of motion. He did this while on a National attempt to simplify the equations in the process of getting an Research Fellowship in Oslo during 1947-8. This step was answer. Jule, on the other hand, found that intelligent simpli- very significant because the treatment he had used in his the- fication was not only needed to get an answer, it also helped sis was generalized to apply to nonlinear flows which, of one understand the physical process. It was this aspect of course, made it directly applicable to real flow patterns. The Jule's thesis work that led him to early success in developing technique he used was a scale analysis. In this procedure, one practical numerical weather prediction models. This simpli- assigns orders of magnitude to variables and to length and fication was arrived at by systematic quantitative arguments. time scales, in order to see if any simplifications result. From Unlike Rossby's barotropic model, it was not based on an in- comments by Jule and Platzman in their August 1980 inter- tuitive short cut. view, I would guess that this approach might have been sug- The second respect in which Jule differed from Solberg gested to Jule when he read Prandtl's analysis of the turbu- was in his ignoring of the polar front. This, of course, came lent boundary layer. (Jule had visited Rossby at Chicago on from his familiarity with the recent work of J. Bjerknes and his way to Oslo, and Rossby had mentioned Prandtl's book Rossby. For some years after publication of Jule's thesis, the when Jule expressed an interest in learning more about principal advantage of this difference from the point of ex- hydrodynamics!) plaining baroclinic instability was only that it was soluble, The quasi-geostrophic system that Jule formulated enabled whereas the discontinuous polar front model seemed intrac- the largely advective large-scale motions to be analyzed and table. However, in 1956 I did some work with Jule's equa- predicted without the distracting complication of gravity tions as a member of his group at Princeton. These computa- waves. They were free of the sensitivity to the latter that we tions predicted the formation of proto-fronts during the now know were the source of Richardson's difficulty thirty process of long wave development. Later, the work of Peter years earlier. It must be conceded, however, that the geo- Stone, Terry Williams, Brian Hoskins, and Frances Brether- strophic system was "in the air" at that time. In 1947, Sutcliff ton showed that true discontinuities of a frontal character derived the vorticity-equation part of the geostrophic sys- were formed by the developing long wave. The front thus was tem. In 1949, Obukhov published his derivation for the baro- seen to be more a creation of the long wave than its creator.