Richard J. Reed and Atmospheric Tides

Abstract

In many respects, atmospheric tides are one of Dick’s more minor interests. I think I am correct that Dick became interested in this problem as a result of consulting activities at the White Sands Missile Range during the early 1960s. However, with his usual combination of insight and originality of viewpoint, Dick’s contribution to this area was major. Luck was also hardly irrelevant to his work here, but Dick, as usual, was astute in both recognizing and exploiting luck. His contributions were characteristically useful to theoreticians — a hallmark of Dick’s work. Dick’s efforts in this area consist of five relatively brief papers from the period 1965–69 (Beyers et al. 1966; Reed et al. 1966a,b; Reed 1967; Reed et al. 1969). There is no indication of prior or subsequent interest. Within these papers, Dick and coworkers simply Fourier analyzed (in time) meteorological rocketsonde data for horizontal wind and temperature as a function of altitude over the range covered by the rockets (approximately 40–60 km). Data binned according to hour as well as data from campaigns of relatively frequent soundings over periods of about 2 days in length were used. Although today the needed mathematical apparatus to conduct such analyses is literally built into word processors, there was no particular novelty or challenge in the analyses 35 years ago either. What proved important were the care exercised in the analyses as well as the specific findings and the fact that we were given vertical profiles of amplitude and phase, both of which sometimes varied significantly in ways that systematically depended on location and period (diurnal or semidiurnal). Before turning to the details, it will be useful to describe the state of atmospheric tidal studies at the time of Dick’s contributions. However, before doing even this, I fuel it personally necessary to point out the important impact of Dick’s work on my own efforts.

“This study has confirmed earlier findings of the existence of pronounced diurnal tidal motions near the stratopause and has provided first clues concerning the worldwide pattern of the wind fluctuations.”—(Reed 1966a)