Waters of the World

by Sarah Dry

  * * *

  There were to be no easy answers to the question of whether modification could be done, much less whether it should be done. Nevertheless, weather modification was, already, a reality. Both intentional and inadvertent modification of the atmosphere was already happening, in places both near and far. In order to have any hope of distinguishing the artificial state of the atmosphere from its natural state, basic atmospheric processes would need to be understood. Simpson and her fellow panel members noted (in 1964) that the major barrier to figuring out which clouds could be seeded was the “great natural variability” of clouds themselves, which included differences in drop sizes, water content, ice content, temperature structure, internal circulation, and electrification.70 This natural variability made careful statistical evaluation both necessary and “very difficult.”

  What was very difficult on the small scale was both vexing and potentially catastrophic on the larger scale. Though it was not yet possible to “induce perturbations to trigger massive atmospheric reactions,” such a day might be foreseeable. What was not yet within reach was the capacity to predict the effects of such a major modification with “continent scale or larger” extent. Until that was possible, the committee concluded that “to embark on any vast experiment in the atmosphere would amount to gross irresponsibility” (italics in original).71

  In order to understand the effects of artificial modifications to weather and climate, the committee suggested that a theory of natural climatic change was needed. Instead of performing experiments in the atmosphere, where their effects would be hard to interpret and which could have unintended consequences, the committee suggested the safe space of the computer model within which “the consequences of artificial perturbations could be assessed.”72 The boundary between the earth and the air, and the sea and the air, was a crucial and understudied aspect of what they still called the large-scale atmospheric circulation (rather than the coupled ocean atmosphere). Field experiments here seemed feasible and much needed, along with numerical studies.

  The panel included a section on inadvertent atmospheric modification, a problem with no sign of abating. “We are just now beginning to realize that the atmosphere is not a dump of unlimited capacity, but we do not yet know what the atmosphere’s capacity is or how it might be measured.”73 The committee also noted that the pollution caused by cities was capable of affecting the local climate. As Rossby and Revelle had, they remarked on the scientific potential of such a “continuing experiment in climate modification.”

  When Simpson left the Weather Bureau, she returned to academia, taking a job as professor of atmospheric science at the University of Miami and taking on the directorship of an experimental meteorology laboratory at Coral Gables. There she continued the work she had started on Stormfury, convinced that if she applied her dynamic seeding technique to small-scale cloud structures, she would be able to generate a testable hypothesis about the potential for generating rainfall from seeded clouds. But this project, too, was to be stymied. If individual clouds could be seeded with her technique, she wondered if seeding could cause more so-called cloud mergers, groups of clouds that were naturally productive of the most rainfall in Florida. Simpson calculated that she would need to do several hundred seeding experiments to detect a fifteen percent increase in rain in the target area. Her boss was unwilling to fund even a hundred cases. Thus the pattern set in Stormfury of research projects handicapped by a lack of data continued. Simpson felt that one of the fundamental assumptions of Stormfury—that supercooled water was present in abundance in hurricanes—had been somewhat slanderously called into question. According to her, data gathered by the NHRP that demonstrated the presence of such water was later thrown away, and new results suggesting no such water was present were used to justify the cancellation of the project.74

  Simpson’s personal involvement in weather modification—both at Stormfury and on the Florida experiments—was a source of regret for her. Weather modification for her had always been a means to an end. That end was not the transformation of clouds or storms, but the gathering of data. She deeply regretted the cancellation of the weather modification programs even as she had distanced herself from them. In a speech she gave as American Meteorological Society President on October 4, 1989, she remarked on the bitter irony that many meteorologists had celebrated the demise of weather modification programs—which they viewed as unscientific—since it was the cloud physics community which suffered from the demise of weather modification research the most, as “badly needed new observational data on clouds is much slower and harder to come by than in the heyday of weather modification experiments.”75

  Simpson’s own thirst for new data sent her toward the last great project of her long career. She moved to a new Laboratory for Atmospheres at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and in 1986 became the lead for the science team in charge of a Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission. This satellite was the first of its kind, carrying a space-based rain radar that could peer deep into the heart of the clouds through which Joanne had so painstakingly flown. She worked on this project for eleven years before it finally launched. The satellite exceeded the goals the NASA scientists had set for it five years after its launch. In 2002, it measured the profile of latent heat released by tropical systems, providing a space-based confirmation of the work she and Riehl had done some fifty years before.

  * * *

  Joanne Simpson participated actively in the preparation of her archive for deposit at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. She annotated hundreds of photographs and wrote numerous short essays to accompany documents from different parts of her life. Much of the archive relates to her long and active career. She also decided to deposit some very personal documents, including the notes and journal she kept during her relationship with C. She explained her decision to share this intimate material in a letter to the archivist. “My work life is well known but I have deliberately kept my personal life as private as possible and hence if I should die before I finish, the material I am starting to send you now on my personal life would be lost, as little of it is known by anyone else.”76 She decided to forfeit the privacy she had guarded for a lifetime because she believed it was critical to portray the full complexity of her life in science.

  As a woman in an otherwise almost entirely male profession, her personal choices had always been subject to public scrutiny—at least those personal choices that she could not hide from outside view. News stories breathlessly reported on her ability to cook and keep a house as well as maintain her professional career.77 Her bold habit of flying through the clouds—and even hurricanes—was all the more surprising since Simpson was, by one writer’s estimation, “a rather wispy and timid-looking blonde,” who, in addition to being one of the top five meteorologists in the world, “runs a big home in Woods Hole, Mass, does all the cooking for her husband and two sons.”78 Despite the sexism, the journalists who wrote these pieces were correct when they noted how entangled Simpson’s home and work lives were. Each of her three marriages was to a man who had emerged from the same small sphere of research meteorology, and her relationship with C. was likewise rooted in their shared experience of scientific work. To deny the centrality of these relationships to her life would be to miss something important. Simpson’s decision to make this intensely personal material available to scholars was taken deliberately. She wanted to make it possible for the full story of her life, in all its complexity, to be told. And she hoped that a time would come when the so-called work/life balance was no longer seen to be a problem only for women, but for all working people.79

  For this to happen, the archives will need to reflect the reality of life as it is lived. For now, the evidence of the multiple roles played by male scientists as fathers, husbands, and lovers remains frustratingly hard to come by. In Simpson’s archive, a fuller portrait emerges, of a woman who lived intensely, and indeed passionately, throughout her long and pr
oductive life. If she chose to conceal much of the storminess of her private life during her life, in the afterlife she envisioned for herself the true complexity of her life was finally given space to breathe. Like the great clouds she studied, Simpson had allowed herself to grow expansively, sometimes with dramatic speed, into areas that had been presumed to be off limits. Her passions and her science were inseparable. “I think I am generally perceived as a pretty cool character,” wrote Simpson. “Nothing could be farther from the truth. To understand how a woman, or a man, for that matter, creates original work in any field, it is necessary to penetrate the emotional masks, and my masks have intentionally been hard to penetrate.”80

  6

  FAST WATER

  At the age of twenty-seven, Henry Stommel was adrift. As a young scientist, he had a strong, intuitive sense of the importance of choosing good problems, but he didn’t yet know what the right problem—scientifically speaking—might be. On the advice of a colleague at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he worked, he read a paper on hydrodynamics, the study of how water moves. This was a welcome piece of pure science, absent the military objectives that had dominated wartime work and which had disturbed him. It was a promising start. Soon after, at a dance hall in New York, he was introduced to Carl-Gustaf Rossby, who had established the department of meteorology at the University of Chicago (and met a young Joanne Gerould) during the war. This meeting was more decisive, a nudge in a direction he might otherwise not have traveled.

  The world was small enough that the dance hall meeting resulted in an invitation to spend a semester in Chicago at Rossby’s lab. He listened to Rossby lecture in a style that appealed to him. Though Stommel was uncomfortable with simple certainties, he was not afraid of simplicity itself. Rossby made bold physical simplifications in his drive to understand atmospheric motions, and this boldness appealed to Stommel. It may have had something to do with a chance event in his life. Stommel himself thought so. As a teenager, due to a typographical error, he received a prescription for eyeglasses that were much too strong for him. He could not read or see the blackboard easily and learned to compensate by seeking out problems with relatively few components, problems that he could easily ponder with what he called his mind’s eye.

  FIG. 6.1. Henry Stommel thinking with pen and paper, c. 1950. Photo by Jan Hahn. © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

  FIG. 6.2. Henry Stommel was a maker, here hammering something c. 1950. Photo by Jan Hahn. © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

  The problem Stommel now decided to think about was why the major currents in the world’s oceans are asymmetrical. Simple as it sounds, no one had yet thought to ask this question, though the phenomenon had long been observed. In every major ocean basin of the globe, the currents are stronger on the western than the eastern side.1 This fact holds true in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean even though those basins have strikingly different coastlines and ocean floor landscapes. Topography could not account for it, so what, wondered Stommel, could? Remembering Rossby’s boldness, Stommel imagined an ocean that was rectangular, straighter and simpler even than a bathtub. He then perturbed it only with a few variables—wind stress at the top and friction at the bottom—and added in the effect of the rotation of the earth on the waters within. He painstakingly hand-calculated the effects of these simple variables on his even simpler ocean, completing his calculations with a slide rule. He discovered, to his surprise, that this simple model of the ocean reproduced the crowding of streamlines on the west. He wrote this up in a paper that was five pages long. It was called “The Westward Intensification of Wind-Driven Ocean Currents.”2

  He was not yet twenty-eight years old, and he had just created a new science, dynamical oceanography. It was concerned with understanding how the waters of the oceans move. What Stommel had shown is that it is possible to describe the large-scale movements of water in the ocean using physics and mathematics. He had done so without a PhD, a fact about which he was for some time self-conscious, despite the advice he received from elder oceanographic statesman Columbus Iselin, director of WHOI. He’d written to Iselin asking for advice about whether he should pursue an advanced degree. Iselin replied that “If you are set in making a professional career in the geophysical sciences, I doubt that a PhD is worth a cent to you. In so far as it would take you time to earn, it would, in fact, cost you good money.”3 The movements of the ocean could be, at least in certain respects, deduced from very simple physical laws. This is how Stommel described it, many years later: “There is a great hydrodynamical machinery of the ocean” that “governs how the flow of the water responds to the winds that drive it at the surface and to the differences of density that are sustained by climate at different latitudes.”4 In other words, a good mechanic can hope to understand what it is that makes the oceans move.

  Stommel believed in the existence of this machinery. He believed it was possible to describe the ocean according to the laws of fluids in motion. But—and this is an important if rather a subtle point—he didn’t believe that insights into the oceans could be deduced from such laws. The laws were too general, and the ocean too complex. He believed that the only way to achieve understanding was by a leap of insight followed by a process of exhaustive iteration. He called the leap a “seed image,” something that he had to invent from somewhere that lay beyond analysis, beyond even language. The iteration is the relationship between this image and something Stommel called reality, for which he took observations of the ocean to be an acceptable proxy. He saw this as a process of crystallization, or, more accurately, of trying (and mostly failing) to get crystals to form. Once he accumulated enough ideas about a particular problem, but had achieved no great insight, he went into an almost trancelike state. He described this state in his memoir. In order to achieve insight, he wrote, “I defocus my mind, to deliberately lose it all, to melt the fragments of ideas into something akin to a hallucinatory vision. In effect, I try to raise the conceptual temperature to some equilibrium value where structure disappears for a few days, and then try lowering it to see what crystallises out.” Rarely was one round enough. Once an image was achieved, he then tested it against observations of the actual ocean. What he wanted to know was whether the image from his mind helped generate the right kind of ocean, the ocean that was actually observable and whose motions it was possible to measure.5

  * * *

  Henry Stommel had grown up near the sea, in Brooklyn and on Long Island. He had studied mathematics and astronomy as an undergraduate at Yale, and when he graduated in 1942, he had registered for the draft as a conscientious objector. Despite his objections to war, he was assigned to teach the mathematics needed for navigation to other young men being prepared by the navy’s accelerated V-12 training program to serve as officers, a task he ended up enjoying despite its military setting. When the war ended, he enrolled in the divinity school at Yale, but he soon realized that he was no more comfortable with the certainties offered by religion than he was with those offered by war.6

  Then, in 1944 he took a job as a researcher at WHOI. His undergraduate education and his experience as a teacher on the navy’s training course had equipped him enough to get him a job at what was then a small but fast-growing institution. He did varied bits of research, but nothing really captured his attention. He was adrift. And there he might have remained, but he was lucky (he was fond of saying so himself). He had come of age at a time and a place when the public was interested in sponsoring scientific research. It was also, not incidentally, a time when the military was pouring vast amounts of money and resources into the sciences that could tell them how to safely fly and land airplanes and how to hide (and detect) submarines at sea. He was lucky, most immediately, to be surrounded by others who took a benevolent interest in him.

  Appropriately enough, his first address in Woods Hole was the old rectory house for a local church, a generous building with plenty of room for a rotating
assortment of live-in bachelor oceanographers. On the walk from home to work, Stommel could see the harbor, and he checked each morning to see whether the boats were still safe at their moorings. Life was both small and large, occupied by domestic amusements (of a bachelor flavor) and outsized adventures on the waters of the Atlantic that teased the shores of Cape Cod. The house in which he lived was itself a kind of ship. In it, the lines between work and life were blurred. A prankish atmosphere, full of punning and physical humor, reigned. This was a new kind of freedom: the conjunction of like-minded but differently skilled souls, each a specialist in his own area, sharing a passion for the ocean.

  He also spent time on real ships, on the seas around Woods Hole and beyond. By his own admission he was an unadventurous sailor and a rather inept seaboard technician, trying to take temperature readings aboard a small ship in the icy winter seas off the Gulf of Maine, mostly in vain. He was not sure what the measurements were for, and he was not confident that they were accurate. The bathythermograph, the instrument then used for taking the water temperature, was itself intemperate, full of mechanical faults. Stommel tried mostly to stay out of the way of the men and the heavy instruments they deployed over the side of the ship. Despite his inelegance, he loved both the idea of being there and, for as long as he could stomach it, the being there as well. He developed a belief, which stayed with him throughout his life, that to know the ocean required spending time on it. He believed it was possible to develop a physical intuition for the water, a gut sense of how it moves, even on scales incommensurate with human experience. Seagoing was also a social activity; he got practice in working with many different kinds of people, and getting along with most of them. “Work at sea rubs off the sharp edges, and makes us better people,” he later wrote.7