Savoring the legacy of Walter Munk

Walter Munk discussed the past and future of wave forecasting on February 16th at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Walter Munk discussed the past and future of wave forecasting on February 16th at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Gary Robbins

Walter Munk flashed his pearly whites and said, "So are you going to interview me on my 100th birthday?" I told him yes and he smiled again. "Would you like to have lunch? I think I'll let you pay for it."

There it was, the Munk charm. At 95, the "world's greatest living oceanographer" is as endearing as ever, something surfers and scientists savored on Saturday at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, where Munk is an emeritus professor. The Groundswell Society held a day-long conference on the future of forecasting and chose Munk as its featured speaker.

Smart choice. Few people have contributed more to oceanographic science over the past 70 years. Munk roamed the world, figuring out the nature of tides, waves and the ocean's inner workings. The mathematical details of it all can be confounding. But the results aren't. Munk pioneered wave forecasting, an advance that, among other things, saved untold lives on June 6, 1944 when his research was used to figure out the safest way to put Allied troops ashore on D-Day. His approach to the the subject reflects his practicality, something that comes across in his soulful, chipper and direct way of speaking. He describes those early wave-forecasting challenges as consisting of "three phases -- sea, swell, surf. Sea being the generation of the waves by the storm area, swell being the propagation, possibly over enormous distances, and the most difficult, surf."

Audience members nodded, and smiled, much as Munk does.

Munk (left) with his Scripps mentor and collaborator Harald Sverdup. SIO

It wasn't a singular accomplishment. Munk was forever experimenting, and in 1963 he undertook what turned out to be a masterpiece -- an effort to see if he could track a train of waves from near New Zealand all the way to Alaska. Scientists simply didn't know if wave energy held up that way. The experiment involved putting wave sensors at a handful of isolated places, including Samoa and an atoll called Palmyra. The experiment was the subject of the documentary "Waves Across the Pacific," which was lovingly presented Saturday by the Groundswell Society. Munk helps narrate the flick and, in a couple of spots, he talks about the "cutting edge" punch-card computers that were use in the 1960s. They are revealing moments. A half-century later, people use cellphones that are light years more powerful than those early computers.

Waves Across the Pacific

You could see the sense of wonder people were feeling Saturday as they watched the film and learned how Munk painstakingly worked through the experiment and found a way to track the wave train. The breakthrough revolutionized surf forecasting. It became possible to give upwards of three days notice of waves that would hit places like Hawaii and Southern California. Such forecasting is standard stuff now, an achievement that gets overlooked. The meteorologists who forecasted Hurricane Sandy last October were, to some extent, building on Munk's work from 50 years ago.

There's a moment in the film in which Munk says, "The sea itself was our laboratory."

It still is. Munk is retired now, but he continues to work on research papers. He studies, and he worries.

"I think the most important issue for the next 30, 40, 50 years will be sea level rise," Munk said just before he took to the stage. "We all have to play a part in solving it. I think we'll muddle through."


