Seventy Years of Exploration in Oceanography Part 3 docx

8 1 Waves and Wave Spectra

Island (100 km west of San Diego). Norman Barber (of the “Barber Wheel”) came

over from the UK to help with the analysis [85]. And there we were; waves from

the distant storms came in through the narrow window between New Zealand and

Antarctica! For one particularly intense event we felt confident to “invert” the wave

data to sketch a weather map of the source region. It showed a storm centered on an

island called Heard Island in the Indian Ocean at 52 degrees south.

von Storch: So that’s where the swell begins. You mentioned a third expedition.

Munk: Having established some of the great circle wave paths, we thought that it

would be interesting to occupy a set of stations along such a path [96]. We chose six

stations: New Zealand, Samoa, Palmyra (an uninhabited equatorial island), Hawaii,

the Scripps’ ship FLIP, and Yakutat, Alaska. I took Samoa (Fig. 1.2), Klaus took

Hawaii; Gaylord Miller (our only graduate student) took Alaska. We were able to

follow wave disturbances for 10,000 km all the way from source to finish.

von Storch: What else did you learn?

Munk: By then Klaus had done the pioneering work on wave-wave scattering, and

we spaced the stations to measure the scattering of the southern swell by the trade

Fig. 1.2 Measuring ocean swell from a Fale in Tutuila, American Samoa (1963). Walter had per￾suaded Judith to take the 0400 daily watch of swell recording. (Edie, Kendall, Judith, Walter, and

Silau playing the guitar)