<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Remembering Colin Hines</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">The research field addressing atmospheric
gravity waves at high altitudes has lost its founder. Colin Hines passed away
peacefully on Sunday, August 30<sup>th</sup>, 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. </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">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. </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">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, </span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:rgb(25,25,25)">Dick Peltier, and
David Tarasick, and postdocs</span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> George </span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:rgb(25,25,25)">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. </span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">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. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">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, </span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:rgb(25,25,25)">“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. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">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. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">We will miss Colin very much and
remember him with a smile. </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Dave Fritts</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.8pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">With inputs from Marv Geller, Bob
Vincent, Norm McFarlane, and Dick Peltier</span></p></div></div></div></div>