Brian Tinsley
Brian Alfred Tinsley is a physicist who for more than 60 years has been actively researching atmospheric physics and space physics. He has been a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Dallas since 1976 and has served many national and international scientific organisations.
Early life and education
Tinsley was born on 23 April 1937 at the Waimarie Private Hospital in Wellington's central suburb of Te Aro, New Zealand. The Tinleys lived at Kaitoke at that time. Edward Hill was his father-in-law. He obtained his PhD from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in November 1963, for research on optical emissions from the upper atmosphere.Career
With his wife, Beatrice Tinsley, later to become the first female astronomer at Yale University, he came to Dallas to work at the newly formed Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, which became the University of Texas at Dallas in 1969.During Tinsley's time at the NSF in the late 1980s he began researching the effects of changes in the sun on weather and climate on the day-to-day, decadal and century timescale. He has been author of more than 40 papers on this topic. He has proposed a mechanism in which the link to the atmosphere is the solar wind that affects the downward ionosphere-earth current density in the global atmospheric electric circuit.
Tinsley formed the hypothesis that the Jz effects are due to electrical charge deposited on droplets and aerosol particles that significantly affect scavenging processes and the concentrations of the nuclei. The consequences of this include changes in cloud cover and rates of precipitation, and changes in surface pressure and atmospheric dynamics, as has been observed.
Tinsley, Dr. Gary Burns of the Australian Antarctic Research Division, and Dr. Limin Zhou of the East China Normal University have shown that there are clear correlations between the electric current output of the internal atmospheric generators in the global electric circuit and surface pressure at both Antarctic and Arctic sites, fully consistent with the changes due to the solar wind. Thus the work has led to the discovery of an unexpected process in meteorology that has implications for climate. That is that the internal generation of atmospheric electricity, mostly in the tropical regions, affects clouds and meteorological processes all over the globe. Observations of cloud changes in polar regions and models of cloud charging and the effects of charge on cloud microphysics confirm these findings. However, recently, the direct link to polar pressure has been disputed. These new findings show that the previously hypothesized relationship between the solar wind and surface level polar pressure changes are likely just statistical artefacts.