Carl Wunsch awarded the 2006 William Bowie Medal by the American Geophysical Union
Award Citation
December 13,2006
Carl Wunsch is a visionary in the study of the ocean and its roles in climate change. Through the impact of research, vision, leadership, and unselfish cooperation, he has shaped the landscape of modern oceanography. He started as a mathematician setting out to seek new approaches to studying the ocean and the solid Earth. His early work made fundamental contributions in diverse topics ranging from ocean tides and internal waves to the Chandler Wobble of the earth. Since his early career, he has been a crusader, advocating statistical rigor in making inferences from observations, a virtue not fully appreciated by the oceanographic community at the time. His work has showed us how to obtain definitive knowledge with quantified uncertainty about the ocean from limited disparate data records. Furthermore, his work has often led to the development of new strategies and tools for observing the ocean. His contributions to the design of the landmark Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiment (MODE) and the POLYMODE experiment in the 1970s to determine the scales of ocean variability are notable examples.
In the late 1970s Carl introduced the inverse modeling method to tackle the problem of ocean circulation as a grossly under-determined system resulting from the extreme scarcity of observations. With the method, he developed a framework for assessing the information content in the sparse observations of the global oceans. Carl's effort has transformed observational studies of the ocean from qualitative description to quantitative determination. This transformation has also created a new paradigm in which numerical models of the ocean are not just a theoretical tool but also a tool for applying ocean physics to observations for optimal estimation of the state of the ocean. The emergence of ocean data assimilation in the mid-1990s for a wide range of applications was to a large extent owing to Carl s contributions.
An entire generation of oceanographers has benefited from Carl s work. I am fortunate enough to be among Carl's numerous students who can attest to this achievement firsthand. Recognizing the dire need for global ocean observations, Carl inspired the international community to campaign for global programs to observe the oceans, leading to the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE), the largest international effort to date to measure the flow field and water properties of the world's oceans. WOCE was developed in the 1980s and successfully carried out in the 1990s. Carl was also the intellectual creator of the highly successful U.S./France joint satellite mission of TOPEX/Poseidon as part of WOCE, for measuring the global ocean surface topography from space. The results from WOCE and TOPEX/Poseidon have revolutionized the way we study the oceans, and set an invaluable benchmark against which we will measure the future change of the global oceans and its effects on climate. For the first time in history, oceanographers can answer questions like, How much change in the ocean circulation and heat storage has taken place in the past decade? What is the uncertainty of the estimate?
Carl's monumental contributions leading to such a fundamental advancement of a branch of Earth science have fully embodied the ideals of the William Bowie Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the American Geophysical Union.
Lee-Lueng Fu, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
