Review of "1960 through 1972, a time of discoveries in large-scale

tropical meteorology" by Rol Madden, submitted to HGSS.

This charming paper is a personal reflection of the developments in

theoretical meteorology, data availability, and computational power

and algorithms, that led to the discovery and publication of the

seminal papers on the MJO by Madden and Julian (1971, 1972).  It was

an absolute pleasure to read and made me realise how important it is

to document the history of discoveries in our scientific field, and

how the combination of external factors combine with having the right

people in the right place at the right time.

The long term impact of the MJ71 and MJ72 papers cannot be

overstated. In particular, the famous schematic of the MJO in MJ72 is

still used (I saw it two weeks ago in a research seminar) 50 years on.

We normally think of the satellite era (post ~1974) as the era which

revolutionised meteorology with a proliferation of new data. But this

paper makes it clear that the 1960s was also a period of great

advances, with long time series from radiosonde stations available for

the first time. This coincided with new developments in atmospheric

theory (in particular the equatorial wave theory of Matsuno), and

powerful computers and a ground breaking new algorithm (FFT) and

application of a relatively new field (spectral analysis) to

meteorological data. Together this led to a fascinating detecive story

where a hitherto completely unknown phenomenon (the MJO) was

discovered, and then comprehensively documented and interpreted. I

still find it amazing now to think that this was all done using

spectral analysis on a small number of radiosonde stations scattered

across the tropics.

I recommend publication. The author might note the following typos below.

Line 27. University of Tokyo.

L34. The --> they.

Page 10. L13. clock speed of 10 mHz.  Should that be 10 MHz? I know

computers were slow then, but they weren't that slow were they?!

Review of “1960 through 1972, a Time of Discoveries in Large-Scale Tropical Meteorology” by Roland A. Madden.

This is an excellent paper. The author provides a personal memoir of his early work that led to the discovery and characterization of the MJO but also does a good job of giving a broader context of the history of this period in tropical meteorology (e.g. the reference to the recent Li et al. paper on relevant Chinese language literature). In my opinion this paper should be published in HGSS after the author considers the very minor comments below.

 

The title seems a little awkward. I would suggest changing this to a version that doesn’t start with the numerical specification of the period.  Here are some possibilities I thought of:

“A Pioneering Period of Discoveries in Large-Scale Tropical Meteorology: 1960 through 1972”

“Pioneering Discoveries in Large-Scale Tropical Meteorology: 1960 through 1972”

“Seminal Discoveries in Large-Scale Tropical Meteorology: 1960 through 1972”

Bottom of page 2/top of page 3: perhaps add the Zipser (1970) citation here when the Line Islands Experiment is first mentioned

Page 6, line 27: add “of” after “University”

Page 6, end of line 34: “Among other things, they..”

Page 7, line 23: “involve” rather than “involves” 

Page 10, line 13: “10 MHz” instead of “10 mHz” 

Page 14, line 16: “ratio” instead of “ration”

Page 17, line 20: Perhaps the title of this section would be better as “Reception of MJ71 and MJ72”

Page 22. Line 4: capitalize “Pacific” and “J. Met…”

I wonder if the Ramage (1970) reference and the reference on page 18 attributed to “American Meteorological Society/…” are not actually the same?  If so, perhaps the reference on page 18 could be deleted.