S. George Philander

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Samuel George Harker Philander (born July 25, 1942 in Caledon , South Africa ) is an American climate researcher, known for research on El Niño .

Philander is the son of a teacher couple and grew up near Cape Town . The family was considered colored under the apartheid regime and was discriminated against. Philander was admitted to Harvard University as an excellent student (Bachelor's degree from the University of Cape Town in 1963 ) and received his doctorate in applied mathematics there in 1970. The dissertation was on equatorial ocean currents. As a post-graduate student , he worked on hydrodynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . From 1971 he was at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, from 1978 as Senior Oceanographer. From 1990 he was Professor of Geosciences at Princeton University and Director of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Science program. From 1994 he was chairman of the geoscientific faculty.

He is concerned with the mutual interaction of ocean currents and winds. Since the thermocline in the oceans is very shallow, this interaction is relatively strong and leads to instabilities and cyclical phenomena such as El Niño in the Pacific with periods of two to seven years. The resulting extreme weather conditions lead to increased precipitation and flooding at the end to which the warm ocean current flows or drought at the other end. The underlying mechanism of mutual influencing of wind and currents was clarified in particular by Philander and - independently of him - Mark A. Cane . In one part of the cycle (El Niño) there is a warm west-east current from Southeast Asia to the coast of Latin America, in the other part (called La Niña by Philander) the current is reversed. El Niño has effects as far as the Indian Ocean (see Southern Oscillation ); Philander also examined this and similar phenomena in other parts of the world, the effect of global warming on El Niño (which tends to exacerbate it) and similar phenomena in the Quaternary paleoclimate .

In a book from 2006 about El Niño, he criticizes the demonization of a natural phenomenon by the media from around the end of the 1990s and sees this more as a model case for future adjustments to global warming.

In 1982 he was visiting professor at the Natural History Museum in Paris and from 1991 visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory .

In 2017 he and Mark A. Cane received the Vetlesen Prize for their research on El Niño. In 1985 he was awarded the US Department of Commerce Gold Medal, in 1985 the Sverdrup Gold Medal of the American Meteorological Society, of which he is a Fellow , and in 1994 he gave the Symons Memorial Lecture of the Royal Meteorological Society . In 2003 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2004 to the National Academy of Sciences . In 2007 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cape Town.

From 2007 he organized workshops for students from poor backgrounds in South Africa. He teaches there frequently and founded the Applied Center for Climate and Earth Systems Science there.

Philander is a US citizen.

Fonts (selection)

Books:

  • El Niño, La Niña, and the southern oscillation, Academic Press 1990
  • Editor: Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change. SAGE Publications, 2012
  • Our Affair With El Niño: How We Transformed an Enchanting Peruvian Current into a Global Climate Hazard, Princeton UP 2006

Some essays:

  • with NJ Burls, C. Reason, P. Penven: Similarities between the tropical Atlantic seasonal cycle and ENSO: An energetics perspective. Journal of Geophysical Research, Volume 116, 2011
  • Where are you from? Why are you here? An African perspective on global warming. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Volume 37, 2009, pp. 1-18.
  • with A. Fedorov, M. Barreiro, G. Boccaletti, R. Pacanowski: The freshening of surface waters in high latitudes: Effects on the thermohaline and wind-driven circulations. Journal of Physical Oceanography, Volume 37, 2007, pp. 896-907,
  • with M. Barreiro, R. Pacanowski, A. Federov: Simulations of warm tropical conditions with application to middle Pliocene atmospheres. Climate Dynamics, Volume 26, 2006, pp. 349-365
  • Sextant to Satellite: The Education of a Land-Based Oceanographer. In: M. Jochum, R. Murtugudde (Eds.), Physical Oceanography: Developments since 1950, Springer 2006, pp. 153–163.
  • with G. Boccaletti, RC Pacanowski: A diabatic mechanism for decadal variability in the tropics. Dynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans, Volume 39, 2005, pp. 3-19
  • with G. Boccaletti, RC Pacanowski, AV Federov: The thermal structure of the upper ocean. Journal of Physical Oceanography, Volume 34, 2004, pp. 888-902

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
personal data
SURNAME Philander, S. George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Philander, Samuel George; Philander, Samuel George Harker (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American meteorologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 25, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Caledon (South Africa)