A remarkable citation for IMAU's Leo Maas

A few weeks ago, a remarkable paper was published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. What made this paper remarkable? First, it is written by Carl Wunsch and Jared Wunsch, where the first author belongs to the absolute top of physical oceanographers world-wide, and Jared is his son. Second, the title explicitly contains the name of a colleague researcher, something that is rather unconventional. Third, the name of that researcher turns out to be our IMAU-colleague Leo Maas!

The title of the Wunsch&Wunsch (WW) paper is ‘Baroclinic tidal conversion: note on a paper by L. R. M. Maas’. Tidal conversion refers to the fact that in a stratified fluid a barotropic tide moving over an uneven bottom generates internal waves, so barotropic energy is converted into baroclinic energy. The WW-paper presents a new look at, and provides extensions of, the important and somewhat surprising finding of Leo (already in 2011) that two-dimensional bottom topographies exist for which the conversion rate is actually zero. The WW-paper is, in its own special way, another demonstration of the high impact of research conducted at the IMAU and of course kudos to Leo!

Huib de Swart

Article: Wunsch, C., & Wunsch, J. (2022). Baroclinic tidal conversion: Note on a paper of L.R.M. Maas. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 946, A47. doi:10.1017/jfm.2022.637