AGU Ocean Sciences Award to John A. Knauss

John Knauss began his career in oceanography at the Naval Electronics Laboratory in 1947, after receiving his B.S. in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a M.S. in physics from the University of Michigan. He then became an oceanographer for the Office of Naval Research (ONR), both as a civilian and as a naval officer. John was one of a small group of physical oceanographers at ONR who convinced the Navy to increase its support of oceanographic research in the universities; this led to the Ten Year Program in Oceanography (TENOC) report. This was followed by an exceptional career as a graduate student and research oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he had the rare experience of making the first full‐scale measurements of a newly discovered current, the Cromwell Current, or Pacific Equatorial Under current; this study served as his Ph.D. dissertation. John's penchants for probing new areas and clarifying existing observations were further evidenced in his Gulf Stream transport work. The Pacific Under current had been discovered in 1952 by Cromwell, Montgomery, and Stroup; Knauss was able to show that it was a narrow coherent feature that spanned at least the entire eastern Pacific. The large transport of the under current measured by Knauss established it as a major component of the circulation in the Pacific. He then undertook an exploration of the Indian Ocean to determine whether or not the Under current was present in that ocean. The discovery of the Indian Ocean Under current in 1963 completed the reconnaissance of the three oceans; the under current had been shown to be a significant feature of the circulation in all three tropical oceans. Notably, all of his early work on descriptive oceanography remains theoretically topical at the present time.