Edgar L Andreas, 1946-2015, In Remembrance

Ed Andreas, a friend and colleague of many in our research community, stepped out of his home office in New Hampshire, went for a run as was his custom, and suffered from a medical event from which he succumbed on September 30, 2015. The organizers of this AMS 20th Conference on Air-Sea Interaction deemed it appropriate to dedicate this session on sea surface processes in honor of Ed, and to begin this session with some acknowledgment of Edgar Andreas' contributions to our science, and some comments on those attributes that made him so productive a research scientist, and such an effective professional collaborator and valued friend. We cannot in the allotted time touch upon all of the air-sea interaction topics that Ed's work has helped illuminate, but we will mention some of the research threads that ran through Ed's almost 30 years at the U.S. Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, NH, and his more than eight years working out of his home in Lebanon,NH, which served as an outpost of NorthWest Research Associates. When we look at Ed's publications, of which there were more than 140, we find that he contributed his insights to a number of topics, many having to do with the Arctic atmospheric boundary layer and with air-sea fluxes at high latitudes, and many reflecting his efforts to improve earlier parameterizations of the sea surface spray flux, as well as others on meteorological instrumentation, particularly for application in the study of the atmospheric boundary layer. Among his most frequently cited papers on the Arctic were his 1987 paper, “A theory for the scalar roughness and the scalar transfer coefficients over snow and sea ice” (Boundary-Layer Meteorology,38), and a paper he co-authored with Persson, Fairall, Guest, and Perovich in 2002 on “Measurements near the atmospheric surface flux group tower…Near-surface conditions and surface energy budget” based on the measurements taken during the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean Experiment (Journal of Geophysical Research, 107). When we look at Ed's most often referenced papers on the topic of sea spray, we come upon his 1998 paper on “A new sea spray generation function for wind speeds up to 32 m/s” (Journal of Physical Oceanography, 28), and his 1995 paper with Edson, Monahan, Rouault, and Smith, dealing with “The spray contribution to net evaporation from the sea: A review of recent progress” (Boundary-Layer Meteorology, 72). An early paper, reflecting his interest in instruments and measurement and following up on his then recently completed Ph.D. at Oregon State University, was “Velocity spectra and cospectra and integral statistics over Arctic leads” which he published in 1979 with his thesis advisor Clayton Paulson (Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 105). And Ed was always open to new ideas, and new research topics. Just in the past several years he became interested in the role of sea spray in facilitating the air-sea exchange of gases, and reached out to collaborate with atmospheric chemists on this topic. Ed Andreas, born in Sterling, IL, never lost his pronounced work ethic, one of his many Mid-West virtues. He was to his core a principled person. But just as Ed's research interests were multi-faceted, so was he a multi-faceted individual. This was apparent when one collaborated with Ed. He was as critical of his own work, as he was of that of others, but he never stinted in praising the work of others in his publications. He was a true believer in the community of scholars, and his community was a global one. Edgar L Andreas was a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society (UK), a recipient of the Antarctica Service Medal from NSF and ONR, and of numerous awards for his technical writings.