CEDAR email: Colin Hines obituary

[Astrid Maute]

Remembering Colin Hines



The research field addressing atmospheric gravity waves at high altitudes
has lost its founder. Colin Hines passed away peacefully on Sunday, August
30th, 2020 with his children around him. Those of us who knew and
interacted with him over many years lost a good friend, an eager,
insightful, and passionate colleague, a formidable and tenacious debater,
and an occasional jokester.



Many in our field know Colin for his seminal 1960 paper, “Internal
Atmospheric Gravity Waves at Ionospheric Heights”. Others know of him for
the Axford and Hines paper, “A Unifying Theory of High-Latitude Geophysical
Phenomena and Geomagnetic Storms”, published in 1961. All of us would feel
very fortunate to have made such impressive and lasting contributions at an
early stage in our careers.



But Colin’s scientific contributions had only begun. Subsequent papers,
with students and colleagues or sole authored, anticipated a wide range of
gravity wave effects that are now recognized to play key roles in larger-
and smaller-scale atmospheric and ionospheric dynamics, and which continue
to be explored today with the benefits of new observational and
computational capabilities. From graduate school at Cambridge in the mid
1950’s to the late 1990’s, Colin’s research efforts helped push our field
forward. He inspired a new generation of researchers who themselves
continued to make major contributions thereafter, among them graduate
students Bill Hooke, Itamar Halevy, Dick Peltier, and David Tarasick, and
postdocs George Chimonas and Franco Einaudi. He also engaged to a
significant degree in the emerging CEDAR community, serving as director of
the Arecibo observatory in the mid 1980’s and participating eagerly in a
long succession of scientific meetings.



According to Norm McFarlane, contributions that had multiple and lasting
impacts on gravity wave parameterization in global climate models included
Colin’s initial exploration of mountain wave drag in 1988 and the
subsequent development of the Doppler spread theory and its related
parameterization employed in multiple global models over many years, and
which is still in wide use in the EU climate modeling community. But
Colin’s scheme was only one of multiple competing parameterizations, and
those of us offering various alternatives had lively debates in
publications and in public. I remember one such meeting at which the
various advocates stood together and debated politely, but firmly. And the
jury is still out today. A parameterization that is acknowledged to include
all the relevant physics has remained out of reach to date, though
high-resolution modeling reveals that all schemes capture some elements of
the full physics.



Throughout his career, Colin liked a good joke. He helped design an early
laboratory experiment revealing gravity wave vertical phase propagation to
be in the same direction as the packet propagation – until, at the very
end, a smoking match ignited, revealing that the opposite was in fact the
case. Colin was an active contributor to the succession of elephant slides
I initiated when we all gave talks using transparencies (yes, we are all
old or have departed now!) to illustrate the “tail” or other
characteristics of the gravity wave spectrum, and to which Colin, Edmon
Dewan, Jerry Weinstock, I, and others designed our own variations. Colin’s
contributions were designed to reveal his view of the value of others’
suggestions regarding the physics accounting for the elephant’s tail.
Perhaps his more subtle jokes were embedded in the three books he self
published, “Long and Shortt, Brokers”, The Croesus Club”, and “Murder at
Arecibo”, in which scientists in our field will recognize some of their
colleagues in the characters portrayed.



Colin would be happy to be remembered as the brilliant scientist he was, a
fierce advocate for, and defender of, his views (in preference to yours), a
bit of a prankster, and a scientist and mentor who inspired a cascade akin
to his Doppler spread theory, but via spawning strong students and enticing
other colleagues, who in turn spawned strong students and additional
researchers thereafter. The University of Toronto now honors the top-ranked
graduating student each year with the “Loudon-Hines” medal, the predecessor
of which Colin won himself in 1949.



We will miss Colin very much and remember him with a smile.



Dave Fritts



With inputs from Marv Geller, Bob Vincent, Norm McFarlane, and Dick Peltier
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