A Conversation with Walter Munk.

In this interview, Carl Wunsch talks with Walter Munk about his career in oceanography; his relationships with scientists such as Harald Sverdrup, Roger Revelle, Walfrid Ekman, Carl Rossby, Carl Eckart, Henry Stommel, and G.I. Taylor; technological advances over the decades; and his thoughts on the future of the field.

Surface gravity waves and their acoustic signatures, 1-30 Hz, on the mid-Pacific sea floor.

In 1999, Duennebier et al. deployed a hydrophone and geophone below the conjugate depth in the abyssal Pacific, midway between Hawaii and California. Real time data were transmitted for 3 yr over an abandoned ATT cable. These data have been analyzed in the frequency band 1 to 30 Hz. Between 1 and 6 Hz, the bottom data are interpreted as acoustic radiation from surface gravity waves, an extension to higher frequencies of a non-linear mechanism proposed by Longuet-Higgins in 1950 to explain microseisms. The inferred surface wave spectrum for wave lengths between 6 m and 17 cm is saturated (wind-independent) and roughly consistent with the traditional Phillips κ(-4) wave number spectrum. Shorter ocean waves have a strong wind dependence and a less steep wave number dependence. Similar features are found in the bottom record between 6 and 30 Hz. But this leads to an enigma: The derived surface spectrum inferred from the Longuet-Higgins mechanism with conventional assumptions for the dispersion relation is associated with mean square slopes that greatly exceed those derived from glitter. Regardless of the generation mechanism, the measured bottom intensities between 10 and 30 Hz are well below minimum noise standards reported in the literature.

An inconvenient sea truth: spread, steepness, and skewness of surface slopes.

Bréon and Henriot (BH) have collected eight million globally distributed satellite images of sunglitter, which yield a few simple, robust rules about the statistics of surface slopes: 1) constant angular spread, 2) linear steepness, and 3) sigmoid (near stepwise) skewness (all with respect to wind speed). Yet the information is sparse because it says nothing about time and space scales. The BH rules are an inconvenient sea truth, too fundamental to be ignored, too incomplete to be understood. With regard to BH rule 1 (BH:1), I suggest that the constant spread is associated with a wake-like geometry of the short gravities. Steepness linearity (BH:2) remains an enigma. Skewness (BH:3) appears to be correlated with a rather sudden onset of breaking for winds above 4 m s(-1). I do not think that skewness comes from parasitic capillaries. These are tentative conclusions; I look forward to intensive sea-going experiments over the next few years demolishing the proposed interpretations.

Twentieth century sea level: an enigma.

Changes in sea level (relative to the moving crust) are associated with changes in ocean volume (mostly thermal expansion) and in ocean mass (melting and continental storage): zeta(t) = zeta(steric)(t) + zeta(eustatic)(t). Recent compilations of global ocean temperatures by Levitus and coworkers are in accord with coupled ocean/atmosphere modeling of greenhouse warming; they yield an increase in 20th century ocean heat content by 2 x 10(23) J (compared to 0.1 x 10(23) J of atmospheric storage), which corresponds to zeta(greenhouse)(2000) = 3 cm. The greenhouse-related rate is accelerating, with a present value zeta(greenhouse)(2000) approximately 6 cm/century. Tide records going back to the 19th century show no measurable acceleration throughout the late 19th and first half of the 20th century; we take zeta(historic) = 18 cm/century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attributes about 6 cm/century to melting and other eustatic processes, leaving a residual of 12 cm of 20th century rise to be accounted for. The Levitus compilation has virtually foreclosed the attribution of the residual rise to ocean warming (notwithstanding our ignorance of the abyssal and Southern Oceans): the historic rise started too early, has too linear a trend, and is too large. Melting of polar ice sheets at the upper limit of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates could close the gap, but severe limits are imposed by the observed perturbations in Earth rotation. Among possible resolutions of the enigma are: a substantial reduction from traditional estimates (including ours) of 1.5-2 mm/y global sea level rise; a substantial increase in the estimates of 20th century ocean heat storage; and a substantial change in the interpretation of the astronomic record.