Walter Munk

Walter Munk was an American physical oceanographer whose career spanned more than seven decades and touched nearly every major subfield of the science. During the Second World War, Munk and Harald Sverdrup developed methods for forecasting ocean wave conditions that were used to support amphibious beach landings across multiple theaters of the war, including the Normandy landings. Munk produced some of the first comprehensive solutions describing ocean currents generated by observed wind patterns and coined the term ocean gyres for the large rotating current systems these winds produce. Beginning in 1975, working with Carl Wunsch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Munk helped pioneer ocean acoustic tomography, a technique for measuring ocean temperature and currents over large distances by analyzing how sound travels through seawater. With physicist Chris Garrett, Munk also developed the Garrett-Munk spectrum, a widely used mathematical model describing the energy distribution of internal waves within the ocean, and his later research addressed tides, Earth's rotation, sea level rise and climate change.