Pen portraits of Presidents – Professor Raymond Hide, CBE, ScD, FRS

Chris K Folland,Peter L Read

doi:10.1002/wea.4105

Abstract

We describe the life and scientific accomplishments of Professor Raymond Hide. He was a past President of the Royal Meteorological Society and a supreme example of a geophysicist much honoured in his lifetime. He covered a wide area of geophysics from geomagnetism, meteorology, geodesy, oceanography and related aspects of planetary physics. Raymond Hide was particularly known in meteorology as a founding father of geophysical fluid dynamics, especially for his experiments using a rotating cylindrical annulus to study atmospheric dynamics.

Highlights

Professor Raymond Hide (Figure 1) was a be useful to investigate the mechanisms of supreme example of a geophysicist who was the generally accepted dynamo theory much honoured in his lifetime
At the end of his PhD, Raymond Hide was related to atmospheric predictability, vacil- some ingenious variations on the theme of given the opportunity to spend some time in lation and deterministic chaos carried out his original rotating annulus experiments to USA with the astrophysicist, and later Nobel while he was at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by Ed Lorenz
Period at the Met Office ment led to the discovery of some intriguing flows in which sloping convecknown as Geophysical Fluid Dynamics. His Starting in the late 1960s, the Met Office tion took the form of chains of compact oval major results from this time were fully pub- under its relatively new Director-General eddies that resembled the large anticyclonic lished in Hide (1958), delayed because of the John Mason greatly expanded vortices seen need to complete three years of compulsory its research base (Folland and Mitchell, 2020). in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn

Summary

Introduction

Officer and it is thought that, at the time, he that occurred for some cases of the middle After leaving Harwell, Raymond was was the most senior research scientist in the type of flow, mainly near the transition to appointed in 1957 to a university lecture- civil service. Dynamics, including stimulating broadly vortex-like eddies which decayed when Here he built up a small laboratory work- related research in any relevant part of the the meandering Rossby wave-like flow was ing on a variety of fluid dynamical prob- Met Office.

Results

Conclusion