Contributions to global ocean observations

Abstract

My father, an attorney, often commented on the dynamics of legal contests: "Moregood stories are ruined by an eyewitness⋯." Over the last 40 years of oceanography to which I have been witness, a similar principle has held. Theory has explained why, and models have simulated, but most of the steps in knowledge have been closely tied to observations. In part, as Walter Munk has often said, this is because "Every time we look at the ocean in a different way we learn something new." Today, those interested in the large-scale structure and variability of the world's oceans are blessed with an amazing array of observations with which to work. Satellites provide the most voluminous ocean data with global coverage and have supported some of the most significant increments in understanding the ocean; the first SST images made vivid the different patterns of turbulence in different regions; today altimetry and scatterometry describe evolving dynamically important fields. Over the last half-century a complementary global in situ observing system has been developed and I have been fortunate to observe some of that development. I would like to tell what I know of its story. The capabilities of the emerging global ocean observing system have been widely described (see Koblinsky and Smith, 2001) and results from the more mature elements have already had important impacts on ocean science. Baker (1981) gives a wonderfully comprehensive, if dated, review of ocean observing instruments while Gould (2005) tells the story of subsurface floats from start to the present. McPhaden et al. (1998) describes the development of the tropical Pacific's Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere (TOGA) observing system and McPhaden discusses it in this volume. To complement these, I focus on some of the ideas, people, and institutions that I think made progress possible. There are three themes: innovation, collaboration and teams, and luck. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc., All rights reserved.