Evolution of physical oceanography

Abstract

Introduction The technical section of this book is divided into four general categories: Within each of these categories will be found several chapters, each of which discusses a broad aspect of physical oceanography or its relationship to an allied field. We asked the authors to respond to the question, "What is the state of the subject today and how did we arrive there? " Where appropriate, we sought emphasis on a description of the evolution of the subject over the past 40 years. Thus, most of these chapters differ from conventional review articles both in their historical sweep and in their depth of coverage. The book looks both backward and forward in time. A substantial fraction of physical oceanography is covered in what follows, consistent with the diversity of Henry Stommel's interests. Indeed, we believe that this book could serve as a textbook in advanced courses on the subject. As with any writing that attempts to be up-to-date, some of the material here is speculative. Nonetheless, we believe that we have in this book a nearly comprehensive description of physical ocean-ography as it was understood toward the end of the twentieth century. The first part of the text is devoted to what might be thought of as "large-scale" or perhaps, classical, ocean-ography. It deals, in several chapters, with the overall distribution and circulation of water properties-a problem that has its roots deep in the nineteenth century. How the different waters move, and why, is treated both in terms of observation and theory. The chapters range from poles to equator, treating the peculiar kinematics and dynamics of these extremes. Much of dynamical oceanography has focused on the Gulf Stream System, and this book is no exception. The Atlantic is comparatively small, making this current accessible to European scientists from the earliest days, and the Gulf Stream immediately confronts oceanographers on the east coast of North America. Thus the subject has periodically obsessed many of the leading oceanographers of the past 100 years. Much of the flowering of circulation modeling, which began in the late 1940s and remains one of the great accomplishments of modem geophysical fluid dynamics, was motivated toward understanding the Gulf Stream. The section concludes with a chapter on estuaries and shelf circulations. The latter in particular was an area of great interest around the turn of the century and has only comparatively recently reacquired the attention of oceanographers, …