|
|
|
|
About David Ellett
A brief description of the career of David Ellett David James Ellett (born 22 July 1934) began his career in ocean science by transfer from the Met Office to the Lowestoft Laboratory in January 1954 as assistant to Lt Cdr J. R. Lumby and Arthur Lee. Over the next decade he learned Atlantic hydrography by participation in wide-ranging cruises to the Barents Sea, North Sea, Irish Sea and Atlantic, including, notably, the ICES Faroe-Iceland Overflow Experiment of 1958. With long spells on both Irish and UK Weather Ships, this period also saw the beginnings of his life-long involvement with Ocean Weather Ships and their data. The themes of David's career can be traced from the research interests of his two mentors. Arthur Lee had begun his own career in 1948 with the amazing events of the "Warming in the North" when such a protracted wave of warmth passed through the Atlantic subpolar gyre as to influence the global mean temperature curve. Jack Lumby and Haakon Mosby of Norway had been fastest to react when in 1946 the international Civil Aviation Organization set up a committee to see how the North Atlantic Ocean Weather Stations could be used for oceanographic investigations; the former set up hydrographic sampling en route and on station at OWS "India", "Juliett", and "Kilo", the latter at OWS "Mike" and "Alpha". Couple these influences to the shift in UK fisheries hydrography from distant to home waters in the 1960s and early 1970s and you have the essential "building blocks" of David's career in ocean variability west of Britain. The Rockall Trough was to be David's main working area and interest to the end of his career, bringing a succession of new insights to what had so long been a data desert; the so-called "shadow of Europe". His collaboration with Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory began when he sailed with SMBA aboard RRV "Challenger for the second ICES Overflow Survey in 1973. This led to his secondment in 1975 and ultimately to his transfer to Oban. Until his official retirement in 1994, he thoroughly explored these waters, deploying the first long-term current-meter moorings in the Trough from 1975, planning then participating in the JASIN Air-Sea Interaction Experiment in 1978, recovering the first unequivocal evidence of a slope current west of Scotland in 1979, and making the first direct measurement of overflow crossing the Wyville-Thomson Ridge in 1987/1988. Many campaigns, but one suspects that David would have derived greatest satisfaction from being designated (1992-1995) a Data Quality Evaluator for WOCE, from the adoption by the community of the term the "Ellett Line" for his repeat hydrography section across the Rockall Trough, and from his use of its time-series to record the arrival of particular vintages of Labrador Sea Water, thus establishing for the first time their trans-Ocean spreading rates. As he happily admitted, he was first and foremost a "watermass" man. Sadly, David Ellett passed away on 5 October 2001.
|
