Richard Lindzen
Richard Siegmund Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He is the author of more than 200 scientific papers. From 1972 to 1982, he served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at Harvard University. In 1983, he was appointed as the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he would remain until his retirement in 2013. Lindzen has disputed the scientific consensus on climate change and criticizes what he has called "climate alarmism".
Early life and education
Lindzen was born on February 8, 1940, in Webster, Massachusetts. His father, a shoemaker, had fled Nazi Germany with his mother. Lindzen moved to The Bronx soon after his birth and grew up in a Jewish household in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood.Lindzen attended the Bronx High School of Science, where he won Regents' and National Merit Scholarships, then Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before matriculating at Harvard University. In 1960, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in physics, magna cum laude, followed by a Master of Science degree in applied mathematics in 1961 and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1964. His doctoral thesis, Radiative and photochemical processes in strato- and mesospheric dynamics, was about the interactions of ozone photochemistry, radiative transfer, and dynamics in the middle atmosphere.
Career
Lindzen has published papers on Hadley circulation, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, hydrodynamic instability, mid-latitude weather, global heat transport, the water cycle, ice ages and seasonal atmospheric effects. His main contribution to the academic literature on anthropogenic climate change is his proposal of the iris hypothesis in 2001, with co-authors Ming-Dah Chou and Arthur Y. Hou.Lindzen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Science, Health, and Economic Advisory Council at the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy. He joined MIT in 1983, prior to which he held positions at the University of Washington, the Institute for Theoretical Meteorology at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Oslo, the National Center for Atmospheric Research , and the University of Chicago. From 1972 to 1982, he served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at Harvard University. Lindzen also briefly held a position of visiting lecturer at UCLA in 1967.
As of January 2010, his publications list included 230 papers and articles published between 1965 and 2008, with five in process for 2009. He is the author of a standard textbook on atmospheric dynamics, and co-authored the monograph Atmospheric Tides with Sydney Chapman.
He was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT from 1983, until his retirement which was reported in the Spring 2013 newsletter of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. On December 27, 2013, the Cato Institute announced his appointment as a Distinguished Senior Fellow in its Center for the Study of Science.
Early work (1964–1972)
Lindzen's early work was concerned with ozone photochemistry, the aerodynamics of the middle atmosphere, the theory of atmospheric tides, and planetary waves. His work in these areas led him to a number of fundamental scientific discoveries, including the discovery of negative equivalent depths in classical tidal theory, explanations for both the quasi-biennial oscillation of the Earth's stratosphere and the four-day period of the superrotation of the Venus atmosphere above the cloud top.Ozone photochemistry
His PhD thesis of 1964 concerned the interactions of ozone photochemistry, radiative transfer and the dynamics of the middle atmosphere. This formed the basis of his seminal Radiative and Photochemical Processes in Mesospheric Dynamics that was published in four parts in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences between 1965 and 1966. The first of these, Part I: Models for Radiative and Photochemical Processes, was co-authored with his Harvard colleague and former PhD thesis advisor, Richard M. Goody, who is well known for his 1964 textbook Atmospheric Radiation. The Lindzen and Goody study has been widely cited as foundational in the exact modeling of middle atmosphere ozone photochemistry. This work was extended in 1973 to include the effects of nitrogen and hydrogen reactions with his former PhD student, Donna Blake, in Effect of photochemical models on calculated equilibria and cooling rates in the stratosphere.Lindzen's work on ozone photochemistry has been important in studies that look at the effects that anthropogenic ozone depletion will have on climate.
Atmospheric tides
Since the time of Pierre-Simon Laplace, scientists had been puzzled as to why pressure variations measured at the Earth's surface associated with the semi-diurnal solar tide dominate those of the diurnal tide in amplitude, when intuitively one would expect the diurnal passage of the sun to dominate. Lord Kelvin had proposed the so-called "resonance" theory, wherein the semi-diurnal tide would be "selected" over the diurnal oscillation if the atmosphere was somehow able to oscillate freely at a period of very close to 12 hours, in the same way that overtones are selected on a vibrating string. By the second half of the twentieth century, however, observations had failed to confirm this hypothesis, and an alternative hypothesis was proposed that something must instead suppress the diurnal tide. In 1961, Manfred Siebert suggested that absorption of solar insolation by tropospheric water vapour might account for the reduction of the diurnal tide. However, he failed to include a role for stratospheric ozone. This was rectified in 1963 by the Australian physicist Stuart Thomas Butler and his student K.A. Small who showed that stratospheric ozone absorbs an even greater part of the solar insolation.Nevertheless, the predictions of classical tidal theory still did not agree with observations. It was Lindzen, in his 1966 paper, On the theory of the diurnal tide, who showed that the solution set of Hough functions given by Bernhard Haurwitz to Laplace's tidal equation was incomplete: modes with negative equivalent depths had been omitted. Lindzen went on to calculate the thermal response of the diurnal tide to ozone and water vapor absorption in detail and showed that when his theoretical developments were included, the surface pressure oscillation was predicted with approximately the magnitude and phase observed, as were most of the features of the diurnal wind oscillations in the mesosphere. In 1967, along with his NCAR colleague, Douglas D. McKenzie, Lindzen extended the theory to include a term for Newtonian cooling due to emission of infrared radiation by carbon dioxide in the stratosphere along with ozone photochemical processes, and then in 1968 he showed that the theory also predicted that the semi-diurnal oscillation would be insensitive to variations in the temperature profile, which is why it is observed so much more strongly and regularly at the surface.
While holding the position of research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO Lindzen was noticed and befriended by Professor Sydney Chapman, who had contributed to the theory of atmospheric tides in a number of papers from the 1920s through to the 1940s. This led to their joint publication in 1969 of a 186-page monograph Atmospheric Tides.
Quasi-biennial oscillation
Although it wasn't realized at the time, the quasi-biennial oscillation was observed during the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, when the ash from the volcano was transported around the globe from east to west by stratospheric winds in about two weeks. These winds became known as the "Krakatoa easterlies". It was observed again in 1908, by the German meteorologist Arthur Berson, who saw that winds blow from the west at altitude in tropical Africa from his balloon experiments. These became known as the "Berson westerlies". However, it was not until the early 1960s that the ~ 26-month cycle of the QBO was first described, independently by Richard J. Reed in 1960 and Veryhard and Ebdon in 1961.Lindzen recalls his discovery of the mechanism underlying the QBO in the semi-autobiographical review article, On the development of the theory of the QBO. His interest in the phenomenon began in 1961 when his PhD advisor, Richard M. Goody, speculated that the 26-month relaxation time for stratospheric ozone at in the tropics might somehow be related to the 26-month period of the QBO, and suggested investigation of this idea as a thesis topic. In fact, Lindzen's, Radiative and photochemical processes in mesospheric dynamics, Part II: Vertical propagation of long period disturbances at the equator, documented the failure of this attempt to explain the QBO.
Lindzen's work on atmospheric tides led him to the study of planetary waves and the general circulation of atmospheres. By 1967, he had contributed a number of papers on the theory of waves in the middle atmosphere. In Planetary waves on beta planes, he developed a beta plane approximation for simplifying the equations of classical tidal theory, whilst at the same time developing planetary wave relations. He noticed from his equations that eastward-traveling waves and westward-traveling waves with periods less than five days were "vertically trapped." At the same time, an important paper by Booker and Bretherton appeared, which Lindzen read with great interest. Booker and Bretherton showed that vertically propagating gravity waves were completely absorbed at a critical level.
In his 1968 paper with James R. Holton, A theory of the quasi-biennial oscillation, Lindzen presented his theory of the QBO after testing it in a two-dimensional numerical model that had been developed by Holton and John M. Wallace. They showed that the QBO could be driven by vertically propagating gravity waves with phase speeds in both westward and eastward directions and that the oscillation arose through a mechanism involving a two-way feedback between the waves and the mean flow. It was a bold conjecture, given that there was very little observational evidence available to either confirm or confute the hypothesis. In particular, there was still no observational evidence of the westward-traveling "Kelvin" waves; Lindzen postulated their existence theoretically.
In the years following the publication of Lindzen and Holton, more observational evidence became available, and Lindzen's fundamental insight into the mechanism driving the QBO was confirmed. However, the theory of interaction via critical level absorption was found to be incomplete and was modified to include the importance of attenuation due to radiative cooling. The revised theory was published in the Holton and Lindzen paper, An updated theory for the quasibiennial cycle of the tropical stratosphere.