AUGUST 2013AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY |AUGUST 2013| 12391238

OBITUARIES

GURI IVANOVICH MARCHUK1925–2013

G uri Ivanovich Marchuk was born in 1925 in the Orenburg region of Russia. Upon graduating from the Department of Mathematics and Me-

chanics at the Leningrad State University, he entered the graduate program and in 1952 defended his Ph.D. thesis, which was titled “Dynamics of Large-Scale Meteorological Fields in the Baroclinic Atmosphere.” From 1953 to 1962, he worked in the Institute of Physics and Energetics at Obninsk, first as labora-tory director and later as chair of the Department of Mathematics. There, he proposed new methods for the numerical modeling of the physics of nuclear

reactors that are still widely used in operational practice. Of special importance in this work is the treatment of radiative transfer. The results of his investigations were summarized in his 1956 doctoral dissertation, “Numeri-cal Methods for Computing Nuclear Reactors,” and in a monograph under the same title. Between 1959 and 1961, Marchuk was among the members of a research team responsible for the development of principles for ensuring the safety of industrial nuclear power plants.

able explanations and verifiable predictions about the natural world. Despite differences in methods, all activities we recognize as scientific share some com-mon characteristics, principles, and values. Science is always based on observations and experimentation. Scientists insist on disclosure of hypotheses, obser-vations, methods, and interpretation of the results through a process known as peer review, which pro-vides other scientists an opportunity to evaluate their methods and the logic that led to their conclusions. A published result may not be fully accepted until other scientists further investigate the ideas through reanalysis of the original observations, taking new observations, repeating their experiments, or running a numerical model—whatever it takes to test the idea. Because of the skeptical nature of scientists, new ideas are accepted very slowly and only after a great deal of scrutiny. In fact, what authority science achieves is based on the openness by which scientific results are presented for review, evaluation, and additional testing. Inclusion in a precollege science curriculum should be limited to topics that meet these rigorous standards, and climate change science as presented in the broad peer-reviewed literature has earned its place within the broader educational framework of the nation.

SCIENCE AND UNCERTAINTY: The 2012 AMS Statement on Climate Change provides the con-text for the current science of climate change and also conveys where there is uncertainty (e.g., in the role of melting permafrost in the rate of climate change). Scientists acknowledge and work routinely within a framework of uncertainty. The broader public and

educational communities may erroneously conclude that such uncertainties render climate science unreli-able or in question. By contrast, the public consumes information daily that includes uncertainty. For ex-ample, a forecast of an 80% chance of rain contains a statement of uncertainty, but most people would grab an umbrella given that forecast. Aspects of climate science such as the greenhouse effect, the f lows of solar and terrestrial radiation, and feedbacks are as scientifically sound as gravity, the human genome, or orbital mechanics.

It falls on educators and policy makers to provide an environment, from elementary through graduate school, that exposes students to the nature and mean-ing of science as well as the rich cache of scientific knowledge. It is essential that educators instill in the next generation the following: how and why science works; how it is self-correcting; the importance of evidence and the value of uncertainty; why through a series of stops, starts, and sidetracks it will move toward an explanation of reality; and why science is the basis for many of society’s technological ad-vancements.

Climate literacy in the next generation of U.S. citizens will ensure a firm foundation of knowledge and discourse as society faces decisions on how to best deal with a changing climate. The nationwide adoption of the NGSS, with its inclusion of climate change science in curricula, will help improve overall climate literacy.

[This statement is considered in force until May 2017 unless superseded by a new statement issued by the AMS before this date.]

AUGUST 2013AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY |AUGUST 2013| 12391238

In 1961, he was awarded the Lenin prize for his scien-tific achievements in the field of nuclear reactors. In 1962, he was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and in 1968 he became a full member of the academy.

Marchuk was an author of some 350 scientific works, including 25 monographs. These works ad-dressed the development and study of efficient algorithms in numerical mathematics, computational methods for nuclear reactors, mathematical modeling addressing problems of en-vironment, immunology, and topics in informatics and computer science.

In the field of numerical math-ematics, Marchuk made many impor-tant contributions to the development of finite-differencing schemes. He developed many efficient schemes for the classes of equations that arise in the theory of nuclear reactors, and he proposed a technique for construct-ing finite-difference schemes on the basis of integral identities that has been further developed by both Rus-sian and foreign scientists. Together with his former students, he developed a number of differencing and variational-differencing schemes to address problems of mathematical physics. Among his most notable contributions was the development of split-ting methods and perturbation algorithms based on adjoint equations, as well as novel numerical methods of linear algebra. Based on adjoint equations and perturbation algorithms, he elaborated principles for constructing efficient small-group models of nuclear reactors. He also made important contributions to numerical weather prediction and to the development of atmospheric general circulation models used in simulating the behavior of the climate system.

The main thrust of Marchuk’s work in atmo-spheric dynamics was to devise efficient methods for solving systems of equations based on various approximations of the primitive equations. Most of the methods that he and his colleagues developed have been incorporated into the codes of numerical weather prediction models used operationally by the Hydrometeorological Service of the USSR and in atmospheric general circulation models and climate models.

The first study in this series, “On the Dynamics of Large-Scale Atmospheric Processes,” coauthored

with N.I. Buleev in 1958, was formally devoted to the study of the influence function for various meteoro-logical parameters in determining the distribution of geopotential, temperature tendency, and vertical motion. This study introduced an efficient method for solving the three-dimensional quasigeostrophic equations, which became the basis of the prognos-

tic scheme for short-term weather forecasts at the Hydrometeorological Service of the USSR for many years. In this study, the authors formulated an equation for the conservation of a quantity essentially equivalent to quasigeostrophic pseudopotential vorticity, from which they computed the geopotential tendency using an analytical Green’s function technique to invert the three-dimensional el-liptic operator.

By the 1950s it had become ap-parent that the main problem in numerical weather prediction was the instability of the climate-system trajectory with respect to small per-turbations in initial data and external

forcings, which renders solutions of the governing equations unstable in the Lyapunov sense, and therefore unstable with respect to perturbations in the terms on the right-hand side. It follows that to improve forecast skill, it is necessary to revert to the full primitive equations involving diabatic heating, even for short-term weather prediction models. In the early 1960s, Marchuk turned his attention to this problem, starting with his paper, “A Theoretical Model for Weather Prediction,” published in 1964 in Doklady of the USSR Academy of Sciences. This study described a model based on the primitive equations in (x, y, p) coordinates that includes radiative transfer and moist processes. In the finite-difference algo-rithm used to solve the equations, the terms involving physical processes and the advection terms are split into separate equations that are solved in successive time steps.

Marchuk’s mathematical analysis of the system of equations used in short-term weather prediction includes consideration of the existence of solutions of the differential problem, the degree of approximation and stability of the finite-difference solutions, and the convergence properties of finite-difference solutions to the exact solution in various prescribed functional spaces. This pioneering line of investigation, which

Guri Ivanovich Marchuk

AUGUST 2013AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY |AUGUST 2013| 12411240 AUGUST 2013AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY |AUGUST 2013| 12411240

is now called “mathematical geophysical hydrody-namics,” was launched with the paper of Marchuk and Demidov titled, “Theorem of the Existence of a Solution of the Problem of Short-Term Weather Forecasting,” which proved the existence of a solution to a simplified version of the governing equations in which diabatic heating and the horizontal and verti-cal diffusion of heat are neglected. It was not until fairly recently that most of the set of problems posed by Marchuk can be considered to have been solved, many of them by scientists whom Marchuk had per-sonally mentored.

Marchuk also made seminal contributions to the mathematical modeling of the oceanic circulation. His contributions in this area can be categorized as 1) investigations of correctness of the formula-tion of the governing equations, 2) construction of efficient schemes for numerical solution of the governing equations on the basis of splitting meth-ods, and 3) formulation and solution of direct and inverse problems in ocean dynamics using adjoint equations. As a test bed for ocean models, he pro-moted a series of oceanographic field campaigns under the umbrella of “sections,” which proved to be the most ambitious observational program in support of climate research in the history of Rus-sian science.

In applying the adjoint equations to geophysical f luid dynamics, Marchuk drew upon his experience working with linear operators in solving problems of neutron physics and satellite meteorology. His for-malism was based on the idea of quasilinearization, which leads to nonuniqueness of the adjoint opera-tor. He employed an intuitive quasilinearization that is correct from a physical point of view with respect to Lagrangian coordinates. This approach could potentially be applied to a broad class of problems for which the adjoint equations satisfy the Lagrange identity in the nonlinear case. An example is the diagnostic study, “Numerical Calculation of the Adjoint Prob-lem for Modeling the Thermal Interaction between the Atmo-sphere and Ocean,” coauthored with Yu. N. Skiba in 1976.

Marchuk also attempted to model the environmental im-pacts of industrial pollution. His idea of using the theory of adjoint equations describing the

transport and diffusion of pollutants enabled him to formulate and efficiently solve the problem of optimal siting of industrial plants to minimize pollution in prescribed ecological zones.

In 1962, Marchuk was invited to join the Sibe-rian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was authorized to use the Computing Center of the Institute of Mathematics of the USSR Academy of Sciences as a basis for organizing an independent re-search institution equipped with modern computer facilities for advancing scientific and industrial progress in Siberia. Under his direction, the Com-puting Center launched intensive research projects in important fields of computational mathematics and its applications to a number of contemporary problems in science and technology, including atmo-spheric and oceanic physics, the theory of radiative transfer, geophysics, and continuum mechanics, as well as computer technology and software support. Within this framework, he organized a number of ongoing seminar series, topical conferences, and symposia. The institute that he directed soon became the major scientific research center in com-putational mathematics in Siberia.

In his role as vice chairman and later as chair-man of the Siberian Branch and vice president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Marchuk developed an extensive program aimed at extending basic and ap-plied research and training scientists. In 1986, he was elected president of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1980, he founded the Department of Computational Mathematics in Moscow at the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which was later renamed the Institute of Numerical Mathematics.

Marchuk will be known for novel and at times surprising applications of mathematics. In 1974, he became interested in the mathematical model-ing of immune reactions in the human body in response to viral and bacterial infections. He was

the first to develop a system of nonlinear differential equa-tions with a delayed argument that adequately describes these processes. On the basis of this and subsequent achievements in mathematical immunology, Marchuk gained recognition as one of the founders of a prom-ising new branch of applied mathematics, and the results

GEORGE W. CRY1930–2013

THEODORE F. FATHAUER1946–2013

GLEN R. FREY1940–2013

WAYNE MOUNT1927–2013

IN MEMORIAM

AUGUST 2013AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY |AUGUST 2013| 12411240 AUGUST 2013AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY |AUGUST 2013| 12411240

of his immunological research are being extended and widely used in medical practice.

Marchuk’s awards and honors included ap-pointment as a foreign member of the Bulgarian, Czecho-Slovak, Finnish, Indian, Polish, and French Academies of Sciences; honorary doctorates at the Universities of Toulouse, Carlow, Dresden, Calcutta, Houston, Oregon State, and others; a Gold Medal for Services to Science and Humanity of the Czecho-Slovak Academy of Sciences, a Silver Medal of the Academy of Sciences of the French Institution, the A. Karpinskiy Medal and Prize (Germany), and an Order of the Commander of Knights of the French Legion of Honor. He was an Honorary Member of the AMS.

All who knew Marchuk were impressed by his enormous capacity for work and by the unfailing optimism that characterized his scientific, social, and personal life. Marchuk’s close friends are familiar

with the story of his decision to treat (successfully, as it turned out) his own chronic lung inflammation on the basis of model-calculated data on the immune response to viral and bacterial infections. Despite his many achievements and his stature in science and government, he was a humble and polite man. There is a story that residents of Obninsk defined a unit of politeness, the “guri,” in his honor, where the polite-ness of ordinary people is estimated to be on the order of 1 microguri. Marchuk was a lover of nature who enjoyed long walks and had a passion for fishing. His family was an important part of his life. He and his wife were married for 62 years. Their three sons are all mathematicians with doctoral degrees, and they have six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. One of their granddaughters is now living in the Silicon Valley in California with her husband and three children.—Valentin P. Dymnikov and John M. Wallace

Instructors: Midlatitude Synoptic Teaching CD, containing over 1,000 lecture slides, is now available!

half-page horizontal -- 6.5” x 4.5625”

New! pr iNt & CD Formats

Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology: Dynamics, Analysis, and Forecasting Gary LaCkMann

The past decade has been characterized by remarkable advances in meteorological observation, computing techniques, and data- visualization technology. Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology links theoretical concepts to modern technology and facilitates the meaningful application of concepts, theories, and techniques using real data. As such, it both serves those planning careers in meteorological research and weather prediction and provides

a template for the application of modern technology in the classroom.

Midlatitude Synoptic MeteorologyDynaMicS, analySiS & ForecaStinggary lackmann

A m e r i c A n m e t e o r o l o g i c A l S o c i e t y

Midlatitu

de Synoptic M

eteorology la

ck

Ma

nn

Sci ence/reFerence

t he paSt DecaDe haS been characterizeD by remarkable advances in

meteorological observation, computing techniques, and data-visualization tech-

nology. Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology links theoretical concepts to modern

technology and facilitates the meaningful application of concepts, theories, and tech-

niques using real data. As such, it both serves those planning careers in meteorological

research and weather prediction and provides a template for the application of modern

technology in classroom and laboratory settings. covereD in Depth:] Synoptic–dynamic meteorology] Synoptically driven mesoscale phenomena] Weather forecasting] numerical weather prediction

the aMerican Meteorological Society (AmS) seeks to advance the atmospheric

and related sciences, technologies, applications, and services for the benefit of society.

Founded in 1919, AmS has a membership of approximately 14,000 professionals, stu-

dents, and weather enthusiasts. AmS publishes 10 atmospheric and related oceanic and

hydrologic journals (in print and online), sponsors more than 12 conferences annually,

and offers numerous programs and services. Visit AmS online at www.ametsoc.org.

“Professor lackmann has prepared an excel-lent synthesis of quintessential modern midlatitude synoptic–dynamic meteorology

that will serve advanced undergraduate and graduate atmospheric science students as well as working scientists and forecast-

ers very well.” —Lance Bosart, Distinguished Professor, Department of Atmospheric and

Environmental Sciences, University at Albany, State University of New York.

“Dr. lackmann has given students of meteorology the gift of an outstanding up-to-date textbook on weather analysis and forecasting. He combines the building blocks of theory with modern observations

and modeling to provide an exceptionally clear understanding of the workings of our

atmosphere.” —Steve Businger, Professor of Meteorology, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

“not since Petterssen’s 1956 book has an intelligent and useful synthesis of synoptic meteorology been written by an expert in

the field. lackmann fulfills a desperate need among today’s students and teachers. no

book has more approached rossby’s vision of a bridge across the gap between theory

and observation than Mid latitude Synoptic Meteorology.” —David M. Schultz, reader at

the Centre for Atmospheric Science, School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sci-

ences, The University of Manchester.

gary lackMann is a professor of at-mospheric sciences in the Department of marine, earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at

north carolina State University. Previously, Dr. lackmann served as a faculty member at

SUny college at Brockport, a post doctoral student at mcgill University in montreal, and a research meteorologist with the naval Postgraduate School in monterey, california. Dr. lackmann has worked at noAA’s Pacific marine envi ronmental lab

in Seattle, and has undertaken extensive collaborations with the national Weather Service. He won an award for collaborative

applied research with noAA (2003), and received the leroy and elva martin Award for teaching excellence at north carolina

State University (2004).

aMS bookS supports the American me-teorological Society’s mission to advance the atmospheric and related sciences, technologies, applications, and services for the benefit of society. it is the goal of AmS Books to help educate the public and advance science by publishing and distrib-

uting high-quality books unique in content and character.

www.ametsoc . o r g /amsbooks to r e 617-226-3998

“Professor Lackmann has prepared an excellent synthesis of quintessential modern midlatitude synoptic-dynamic meteorology.”

— Lance Bosart, Distinguished Professor, Department of atmospheric and environmental sciences, the University of albany, state University of new York

© 2011, PaPerbaCk, 360 PaGeS Digital edition also available ISbn: 978-1-878220-10-3 aMS CoDe: MSM LIST $100 MeMber $75 STuDenT $65 Midlatitude

Synoptic Meteorologyteaching cD

A M E R I C A N M E T E O R O L O G I C A L S O C I E T Y