James Lighthill

Sir James Lighthill and modern fluid mechanics: A memorial tribute

This memorial tribute commemorates Sir James Lighthill the man and the mathematical scientist. A brief biographical information is presented with my personal reminiscences. His major contributions to fluid mechanics with special reference to nonlinear dispersive waves are discussed. By any standards, his legacy of research and publications of six books and one hundred fifty papers will remain f...

James

a chair, he was the very picture of dejection. His small head was hanging, an obstreperous tuft of the coarse, sandy hair standing defiantly upright on the crown of it; his complexion was sallow and pasty, and not in any way enhanced by a sparse scattering of tiny yellow freckles, plainly visible at close view; his generous mouth drooped, like his head, the lips pale, but firmly closed. In his ...

A note concerning the Lighthill "sandwich model" of tropical cyclones.

The basic element of Lighthill's "sandwich model" of tropical cyclones is the existence of "ocean spray," a layer intermediate between air and sea made up of a cloud of droplets that can be viewed as a "third fluid." We propose a mathematical model of the flow in the ocean spray based on a semiempirical turbulence theory and demonstrate that the availability of the ocean spray over the waves in...

Balance, Potential-vorticity Inversion, Lighthill Radiation, and the Slow Quasimanifold

Practically our entire understanding of large-scale atmosphere–ocean dynamics depends on the notions of balance and potential-vorticity inversion. These are essential, for instance, for a clear understanding of the basic Rossby-wave propagation mechanism, or quasi-elasticity, that underlies almost every large-scale fluid-dynamical phenomenon of meteorological and oceanographical interest, from ...

James Taylor