Henry Stommel

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Henry Melson Stommel (September 27, 1920 - January 17, 1992) was a major contributor to the field of physical oceanography. Beginning in the 1940s, he advanced theories about global ocean circulation patterns and the behavior of the Gulf Stream that form the basis of physical oceanography today. Widely recognized as one of the most influential and productive oceanographers of his time, Stommel was both a groundbreaking theoretician and an astute, seagoing observer.

Stommel was born in Wilmington, Delaware. An anomaly among modern scientists, Stommel became a full professor without an earned doctorate. He received his B.S. from Yale University (1942) and served there as instructor in mathematics and astronomy (1942–44). A research associate at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from 1944 to 1959, he became professor of oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 and remained there except for the years 1960–63, when he taught at Harvard. Stommel established several stations to study ocean currents, including the PANULIRUS station (begun in 1954) in Bermuda. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1962 and received the National Medal of Science in 1989.

Henry Stommel showed that the north-south gradient of the strength of the Coriolis force (the "beta effect") was responsible for the observed fact that western boundary currents, such as the Gulf Stream and the Kuroshio Current, are much narrower and faster than eastern boundary currents, such as the California Current and Canary Current. Both of these western boundary currents move significant amounts of warm waters northward and are important in transporting the excess heat the earth receives in the tropics towards the poles. Oceanic gyres are not symmetric due to faster currents on their western boundaries.

He proposed a global circulation in which surface water sinks in the far north to feed the deep, south-flowing current, while water rises in the Antarctic region to supply a northward flow along the eastern coasts of North and South America. Much of this theory has been confirmed. In addition to his work on ocean currents, Stommel did research on a variety of problems in oceanography and meteorology.

Stommel married Elizabeth Brown, daughter of Huntington Brown, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, and Elizabeth Waldo Wentworth Brown, originally of Boston, on December 6, 1950. They had three children: Matthew (a professional fisherman in Falmouth, Mass.), Elijah (a physician at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center), and Abigail Stommel Adams (a nurse practicing in Falmouth).

[edit] Bibliography

Science of the Seven Seas, Cornell Maritime Press, 1945.
A View of the Sea, Princeton University Press, 184 pages, 1991. 0691024316
Lost Islands: The Story of Islands That Have Vanished from Nautical Charts, University of British Columbia Press, 146 pages, 1984. 0774802103
The Gulf Stream; A Physical and Dynamical Description, Second Edition, University of California Press, 1972. 0520012232