Henry Stommel

Henry Stommel was an American physical oceanographer whose theoretical work in the 1940s and afterward fundamentally shaped the modern understanding of large-scale ocean circulation. Stommel showed that the north-south variation in the strength of the Coriolis force, an effect now called the beta effect, explains why powerful currents such as the Gulf Stream become concentrated and intensified along the western edges of ocean basins rather than the eastern edges, a phenomenon known as western intensification. Working with Arnold Arons, Stommel extended this reasoning to describe circulation patterns in the deep ocean, contributing to an early comprehensive picture of global ocean circulation, and he also developed early box models of thermohaline circulation suggesting that ocean circulation could settle into more than one stable pattern. With his wife Elizabeth, Stommel researched and helped establish the connection between the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia and the unusually cold 1816 Year Without a Summer that followed it in the Northern Hemisphere.