William Christopher Swinbank

William Christopher Swinbank (8 May 1913 – 28 December 1973) was a British-born meteorological physicist who worked at the UK Meteorological Office, the CSIRO Australia and the NCAR Colorado. His main areas of research were fog prediction, upper atmosphere analysis, wind predictions, hail storms and turbulent fluxes.

Early life William Swinbank was born on 8 May 1913 in the small coal mining village of Easington in County Durham, UK where his father worked above ground at a local colliery as a mechanical engineer. Swinbank was the oldest of three boys. He won a scholarship to Henry Smith Grammar School in Hartlepool and went up to Durham University (Hatfield College) where he took a Double Honours in Mathematics and Physics, graduating 1934.

Career After leaving university, Swinbank worked briefly as a schoolteacher and also in industrial research. In 1938 he commenced working as a meteorologist at the UK Met Office.

The Met Office 1938–1948 In 1938, Swinbank began work as a Met Office Technical Officer for the Air Ministry and was attached to various RAF bases to carry out weather forecasting duties. In 1940, he was given the task of investigating the issue of fog, since this was critical to the operations of an airbase. He initially worked with C.S. Durst in the areas of cloud physics and turbulence. In 1942 he moved to the forecasting headquarters at RAF Dunstable in Bedfordshire and continued his research on fog. In 1944, RAF Dunstable played an important role in forecasting the weather patterns leading up to the D-Day landings and Swinbank, along with Priestly and Andrezej Berson were involved in this forecasting. After the war, Swinbank returned to the study of fog as well as agricultural physics and worked closely with the meteorologist H. L. Penman. and laid the foundation for the development of eddy covariance.

CSIRO 1948–1969 In 1948, Swinbank moved to Australia to take up a position in the newly formed section of Meteorological Physics (later renamed Atmospheric Physics) at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Aspendale, a suburb of Melbourne. He worked with C. H. B. Priestley who had joined the organisation two years earlier. His early work at the organisation was in micrometeorolgy where he developed the use of hot wire anemometry for the direct measurement of the turbulent fluxes of heat, water vapour and momentum. Swinbank was an advocate for large scale atmospheric field experiments and between 1962 and 1964 established research projects in Kerang (Vic) and later on in Hay (NSW) for the recording of accurate data for later analysis. The project ran for five years until 1976.

Personal life In 1939 Swinbank married Ivy Hook and they had a daughter, Susan. Both Ivy and Susan died in 1940 within a day of each other. In 1942 he met Angela Pinney while they were both working at RAF Dunstable in Bedfordshire and they married in December of that year. In 1948, Swinbank, his wife and two children moved to Australia and lived in Mt Eliza near Melbourne. He came to Australia to work in the newly founded CSIRO. They had four more children. In 1969, Swinbank took up a position at NCAR in Colorado and he died in Boulder on 28 December 1973. In May 1974, the Boundary-Layer Meteorology journal published a memorial edition to which colleagues from around the world contributed articles.

Awards

1941 Elected Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society 1968 Winner of the Buchan Prize by the Royal Meteorological Society

Selected publications

Priestley, C. H. B and Swinbank, W. C. (1947) Vertical transport of heat by turbulence in the atmosphere Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A189: 543–56 Swinbank, W. C. (1948) Note on the formation of fog over a snow surface. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. 1948; Vol 74(Issue 321-322):406-407. Swinbank, W. C. (1949) Prediction diagrams for radiation fog. Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10469/ Swinbank, W. C. (1951) The measurement of vertical transfer of heat and water vapor by eddies in the lower atmosphere. Journal of Meteorology. 1951; 8(3):135-145 Swinbank, W. C. (1956) The physics of natural evaporation. Australian Meteorological Magazine. 1956; (14):58-59. Swinbank, W. C. (1960) Wind profile in thermally stratified flow. Nature. 1960; 186(4723):463-464. Swinbank, W. C. (1963) Long‐wave radiation from clear skies. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 89(381):339-348. doi: 10.1002/QJ.49708938105 Swinbank, W. C and Dyer A.J. (1967) An experimental study in micro-meteorology. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. Vol 93 (Issue 398):494-500. Swinbank, W. C. & Dyer, A. J. (1968). Micrometeorological expeditions 1962-1964. Melbourne: C.S.I.R.O Swinbank, W. C. (1970). Structure of wind and the shearing stress in the planetary boundary layer. Archiv Für Meteorologie, Geophysik Und Bioklimatologie, Serie A, 19, 1–12.