Henry Stommel

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Henry Stommel, 1979

Henry Melson Stommel (born September 27, 1920 in Wilmington , Delaware , † January 17, 1992 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an American oceanographer .

Life

Stommel studied at Yale University , where he made his bachelor's degree in 1942 and then worked as an instructor in mathematics and astronomy until 1944 . From 1944 to 1959 he was a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOAI), initially as part of compulsory military service. In 1954 he built the Panulirus Station on the Bermuda Islands for the Woods Hole Institute . Although he never received a doctorate, he became professor of oceanography at Harvard University in 1959 due to his scientific work . From 1963 he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from 1978 back to Woods Hole until his retirement.

Stommel was one of the leading oceanographers and did fundamental work in the 1940s and 1950s in the elucidation of the global ocean circulation and the physical mechanisms behind it. For example, he found (initially in models that were later confirmed by observation) how these are closed by deep currents and he found the cause of the strengthening of the western currents such as the Gulf Stream compared to their eastern counterparts. He also dealt with turbulent diffusion, the classification of estuaries and the influence of volcanoes on climate.

In 1959 Stommel was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , 1961 to the National Academy of Sciences . In 1989 he received the National Medal of Science . He was a foreign member of the then Academy of Sciences of the USSR since 1976 , of the Royal Society since 1983 and of the Académie des Sciences since 1984 . In 1983 he received the Crafoord Prize , and in 1986 the Albert Defant Medal , awarded for the first time by the German Meteorological Society . The American Meteorological Society awards him the Henry Stommel Research Award for Oceanography in his honor .

He had been married since 1950 and had two sons and a daughter.

Fonts

  • Collected Works , American Meteorological Society, 1996, 3 volumes, editors Nelson Hogg, Rui Xin Huang
  • Science of the Seven Seas , Cornell Maritime Press, 1945.
  • The Gulf Stream; A Physical and Dynamical Description , 2nd Edition, University of California Press, 1972. ISBN 0520012232
  • Lost Islands: The Story of Islands That Have Vanished from Nautical Charts , University of British Columbia Press, 1984. ISBN 0774802103
  • A view of the sea: A Discussion between a Chief Engineer and an Oceanographer about the Machinery of the Ocean Circulation , Princeton University Press, 1987. ISBN 0691084580 (2001 also translated into Chinese)
  • with Dennis W. Moore An Introduction to the Coriolis Force , Columbia University Press, 1989. ISBN 0231066376

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Henry Melson Stommel. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed October 24, 2015 .
  2. ^ Entry on Stommel, Henry Melson (1920-1992) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
personal data
SURNAME Stommel, Henry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stommel, Henry Melson (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American oceanographer
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Wilmington , Delaware
DATE OF DEATH 17th January 1992
Place of death Boston , Massachusetts