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He set up the mooring program in 1988 and argued for thirty years that the value of a record is that it does not stop.
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The Department of Ocean and Earth Sciences has marked the death of an emeritus professor who joined the founding faculty in 1986 and established the mooring program that still operates.
He arrived when the department had two staff and no ship time, and spent his first two years persuading the university that continuous measurement was worth funding when nothing in particular was happening. That argument, colleagues note, is one he never entirely stopped making.
"Every few years somebody proposes that the moorings come out for a while," said Elena Reyes, who now chairs the department and was his doctoral student. "He would explain, again, that a record with a gap in it is two records. He was right and it was tiresome and both of those things were the point."
The mooring record he began in 1988 is now among the longer coastal time series on this coast. The 2021 marine heatwave, the shelf exchange work, and most of the department's current understanding of regional variability rest on it.
He supervised twenty-three doctoral students across his career, and continued coming into the department one day a week for eleven years after retiring, mostly to look at the data.
A memorial gathering will be held at the start of the fall term. The department has asked that anyone wishing to mark his contribution consider a gift to the graduate student sea-time fund.
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