Edgar “Ed” L Andreas 1946–2015

Abstract

Edgar Andreas died on 30 September 2015 in Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA. Ed was born on 6 December 1946 in Sterling, Illinois, USA. Known as an independent thinker, he made important advances in the development of instrumentation and methods of data analysis and he contributed substantially to improved understanding of boundary-layer meteorology (Fig. 1). Ed worked in a variety of fields within boundary-layer meteorology, concentrating on fluxes from water, ice, and snow surfaces; but he also published work on fluxes from snow-free land surfaces and even on fluxes from the surface of the moon. He published many valuable papers in atmospheric and geophysical journals but additionally published in the American Journal of Physics, Physics Today, Applied Optics, Journal of the Optical Society of America, Radio Science, and Cold Regions Science and Technology. He received his Ph.D. in physical oceanography at Oregon State University in 1977 under the direction of Clayton Paulson where he studied internal boundary layers over Arctic leads and published a pioneering paper on this subject. For this work, Ed participated as a major contributor in the first of what would become a dozen field programs during his career. In 1978, Ed was hired as a research physicist at the US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. At CRREL, Ed had two notable Antarctic firsts. In 1981, he was a member of the Weddell Polynya Expedition, which made the first deep penetration into the Antarctic ice pack and was the first time that American and Russian scientists worked together on the Antarctic sea-ice. In 1992, Ed was the lead American meteorologist on the American and Russian ice station Weddell, the first research ice camp ever deployed on drifting Antarctic sea-ice. It floated northward for 4months, paralleling the track of Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Endurance, and was the first human visit to this remote area in the 75years since Shackleton’s epic adventure. Additionally, Ed participated in several expeditions to the Arctic. Whilst at CRREL, Ed worked on surface fluxes over snow, ice, marginal ice zones and water surfaces.He continuedwork on instrumentation issues includingwork on the ship boom assembly, calibration and interpretation of hot-film data, the effective averaging inherent in