All within traveling distance are invited to attend this lecture at NASA Goddard, relevant to IVS work: please see details below.
The 2025 William Nordberg Memorial Award and Lecture
Honoring recipient: Richard Ray
Tuesday, July 21 2026, 3:00-4:00pm
Building 3 Goett Auditorium, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (8800 Greenbelt Road, Greenbelt, MD 20771)
“The Tides: A Modern View of a Victorian Science”
Abstract: The science of ocean tides is an old subject whose history is dominated by great names of the Victorian era. In fact, during the late 20th century, the subject had a reputation of being too Victorian and of interest to only a few oceanographers. Mainstream oceanography had more modern topics such as the general circulation to worry about. Yet there has always been a small group of geophysicists interested in tides because of the connections with tidal dissipation, earth rotation, and the history of the lunar orbit. And its importance to geodesy has never waned.
Satellite altimetry, an instrument of both geodesy and oceanography, has invigorated the subject. In the 21st century, the tides have become a modern, even fashionable, topic of oceanography. Old problems like tidal dissipation have been resurrected in light of global measurements of altimetry, and tides are now seen to have deep connections with the difficult and critical problem of ocean mixing. Understanding how mixing is to be handled in ocean circulation and climate models, and working out the role played by tides, are issues now at the forefront of modern oceanography.