| Authorised form of name | Cartwright; David Edgar (1926 - 2015) |
| Dates | 1926 - 2015 |
| Nationality | British |
| Place of birth | London, England, United Kingdom |
| Date of birth | 21/10/1926 |
| Place of death | West Sussex, England, United Kingdom |
| Date of death | 02/12/2015 |
| Occupation | Oceanographer |
| Research field | Marine sciences |
| Tides |
| Ocean waves |
| Activity | Education:
Worthing High School for Boys; St John's College, University of Cambridge, BA in natural science and electronics (1946); King's College London, BSc in mathematics (1951), DSc (1968)
Career:
Dublier Condenser Company (1946); GEC Illumination Engineering Laboratory (1947-1949); Scientific Officer, Department of Naval Construction (1951-1954); National Institute of Oceanography (1954-1973); Research Sabbatical, Institute of Geophysics amd Planetary Physics, California, United States of America (1964-1965);Scripps Institution of Oceanography (1973); Assistant Director, Institute of Oceanographic Sciences ( later the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, then the National Oceanography Centre at Liverpool) (1974-1986); Senior Research Associate, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland, United States of America (1987-1989); NASA Consultant, helped to plan the launch of the successful Topex-Poseidon satellite (1992);
Memberships:
Hon RSNZ (1964); FRAS (1975); American Geophysical Union (1991) |
| Membership category | Fellow |
| Date of election | 15/03/1984 |
| Age at election | 57 |
| Relationships | Married (1951) Anne-Marie Guerin |
| PublishedWorks | 'Tides - a Scientific History' (1999); https://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n98013809/ |
| OtherInfo | After making important contributions to the statistical theory of ocean surface waves and the oscillatory motions of ships, David Cartwright became a leading investigator of ocean tides. He owed his success in this to a well-combined use of the available tools; deep sea pressure measurements using specially developed instruments in carefully selected sites, analysis of these and other records using powerful new methods of time series analysis, and skilled interpretation in terms of tidal dynamics supplemented by numerical models where required.
His interests included the tides of the solid Earth and the surprisingly strong interactions between the fluid and solid tides: his major paper on the north-east Atlantic (the result of ten years of observation, analysis and interpretation) provides the first directly measured estimates of the oceanic tidal energy flux and dissipation since the pioneering studies of Geoffrey Taylor and Harold Jeffreys, with implications for the longstanding problem of the Moon’s recession from the Earth.
Dr David Cartwright FRS died on 2 December 2015. |
| Source | Sources:
Royal Society profile page (https://royalsociety.org/people/david-cartwright-11190/, accessed 2 February 2021)
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Edgar_Cartwright, accessed 2 February 2021)
ODNB
'In Memmorium of David Cartwright FRS', National Oceanography Centre (https://noc.ac.uk/news/memoriam-dr-david-cartwright-frs, accessed 2 February 2021)
Obituaries:
Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 2017, Vol 63, pp 99-115 (doi:10.1098/rsbm.2017.0001, accessed 2 February 2021)
References:
Walter Munk, 'Solving the Tidal Problem', review of David E Cartwright, Tides: A Scientific History in NR 2000 vol 54 pp 116-119
D E Cartwright, 'The Tonkin tides revisited' in NR 2003 vol 57 pp 135-142 |
| Virtual International Authority File | http://viaf.org/viaf/19837468 |
| Code | NA3351 |