ELLISON

UNITED KINGDOM (see also List of Individuals)

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1.8.1927 St. Annes-on-Sea/UK - 4.12.1976 Isle of Man/UK

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Thomas Herbert Ellison was educated in physics and mathematics at Clare College, Cambridge. He became a research student at Cavendish Laboratory under Geoffrey Ingram Taylor (1886-1975) and part of a distinguished group of fluid dynamicists. After having submitted his PhD thesis, he continued in Cambridge to study turbulent transfer processes in the lowest layer of the atmosphere. Once having left Cambridge, Ellison joined the Department of the Mathematics of Fluids at Manchester University, to conduct fundamental research on the entrainment of stratified flows, in collaboration with John Stewart Turner (1930-). After having married in 1960, Ellison went to the Isle of Man dividing his efforts between his financial and his scientific interests. He got cut off from the mainstream of meteorology but still helped in reviewing papers and organizing conferences such as the GARP Study Conference in Stockholm in 1966. After divorce in 1971 from his wife, Ellison turned ill and passed away much too early. A quiet, unostentatious man, shy enough to seem awkward to people who did not know him well and uncompromising enough to seem difficult sometimes to those who had left.

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Ellison's PhD thesis is an exhibition of his theoretical ability and practical interest involving the equations of turbulence, the theory of isotropic turbulence, the measurement of turbulence near the ground and the propagation of waves through a turbulent medium. In the 1950s he prepared a review on turbulent transfer processes for the G.I. Taylor 70 years anniversary volume. This paper includes also a computation on the classical problem of the approach to the geostrophic wind and the suggestion that the aerodynamic roughness of the sea surface was determined by the shearing stress. By the end of the 1950s, Ellison also presented his important work on the Turbulent transfer of heat and momentum from an infinite rough plane.

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_{Charnock, H. (1977). Thomas Herbert Ellison. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 103: 832.}

_{Ellison, T.H., Turner, J.S. (1959). Turbulent entrainment in stratified flows. Journal of Fluid Mechanics 6: 423-448.}

_{Ellison, T.H. (1962). The universal small-scale spectrum of turbulence at high Reynolds numbers. Mécanique de la turbulence: 113-121, A. Favre, ed. CNRS: Paris.}

_{Turner, J.S. (1997). G.I. Taylor in his later years. Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics 29: 1-25. P}