A tribute to Dr. Richard M. Goody (1921-2023)
Richard M. Goody, Mallinckrodt and Gordon McKay Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, died on 3 August 2023 at the age of 102. Goody made fundamental contributions to geophysics and left a rich legacy, especially in atmospheric radiation.
A native of Hertfordshire in the UK, Goody acquired his bachelor’s degree in physics in 1942 from Cambridge University. He then reported to the British army and joined the Aircraft and Armament Experimental Establishment at Amesbury. In this military capacity, he conducted ambient atmospheric measurements and began his 70+ years of endeavors in atmospheric research. In October 1946, he returned to Cambridge to study for a Ph.D. under the supervision of F. R. S. Gordon BBM Sutherland, a famous infrared spectroscopist. Goody obtained his Ph.D. in 1949 and stayed as a research fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge, for four years. In 1953, he took on a Readership in the Department of Meteorology at Imperial College. Goody was appointed the Abbott Lawrence Rotch Professor of Dynamic Meteorology and Director of the Blue Hill Observatory at Harvard University in 1958. He spent the rest of his career at Harvard University and became emeritus in 1991. In the following two decades, he was a frequent visitor of JPL, where he held the position of distinguished visiting scientist (the first of its kind).
Throughout his career, Goody made seminal contributions to both the theoretical and observational side of atmospheric physics, a trait that distinctively distinguished him from his peers. For his Ph.D. dissertation, he built a spectrometer to measure the solar spectra of the 6.3 µm water-vapor band above 10 km from a wooden-framed Mosquito fighter bomber. With the same spectrometer, he also managed to measure the vertical distribution of N2O, which was a recently discovered gas in the atmosphere back then. At the same time, he published a study in Proceedings of the Royal Society on using simple heuristic arguments of radiative-convective equilibrium to quantitatively estimate the height of tropopause and how it should vary with latitude. After graduation, he and colleagues in Cambridge developed laboratory techniques for making very accurate, low-spectral resolution measurements of gaseous absorptions. In 1952, he published his most well-known study on using the random band model to treat the band-averaged absorptance of water vapor in order to interpret such measurements. For following several decades, the random band model became a standard approach in atmospheric radiative transfer calculations.
During his tenure at the Imperial College, he built a large grating spectrometer with a spectral resolution of 1 cm-1 for thermal emission studies. With Desmond Walshaw, they inverted the data to obtain the tropospheric ozone from the 9.6 µm band of ozone, a feat well ahead of the era of remote sensing of atmospheric constituents. Goody and his group also developed a 1500K blackbody, which helped them set a record of precise solar infrared measurements at the time. From this set of observations, in 1958, Roach and Goody derived the absorption coefficients of the water-vapor continuum in the mid-infrared window region. It has been pointed out recently that the term “water vapor continuum” was coined for the first time in the same publication. During this era, Goody also studied the breakdown of local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) in the upper atmosphere with his collaborator Andrew R. Curtis. They proposed an iterative matrix method to treat the source function for such non-LTE radiative transfer, which is still the standard treatment for non-LTE radiative transfer.
Since the mid-1950s, Goody has gradually shifted his interest to planetary atmosphere studies, especially the Martian and Venusian atmospheres. He played a key role in the U.S. exploration program on the atmospheres of other planets, principally Mars and Venus. Nevertheless, he made another breakthrough in observational techniques: in 1968, he published a single-authored paper introducing gas correlation spectroscopy and its laboratory implementation. Gas correlation spectroscopy (a.k.a. optical correlation spectroscopy) has been adopted in many measurements of upper atmospheric absorption and emission, one of the most well-known examples probably being the UARS Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE).
Goody wrote several highly influential textbooks. Atmospheric Radiation: Theoretical Basis 1st Edition in 1964 and 2nd Edition in 1989 are widely regarded as the authoritative treatises of modern atmospheric radiation. They were adopted as graduate textbooks and used as reference books worldwide for generations and generations of atmospheric scientists. Principle of Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry was published in 1995 and based on years of Goody’s teaching at Harvard. It was a graduate-level textbook for motivated students without prior knowledge of atmospheric science. Challenging yet full-of-physics-insight questions can be found at the end of each chapter.
Goody chaired the Space Studies Board for the National Academies of Sciences from 1974 to 1976. He co-authored the “Charney report” in 1979, arguably the most publicized early assessment of the influence of carbon dioxide on future climate led by Jule G. Charney. Since the late 1990s, Goody has been actively promoting the merits of establishing a spaceborne climate monitoring system to test climate projections made by models.
Goody has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1970. Among his many awards are the Buchan Prize of the Royal Meteorological Society (1958); the 50th Anniversary Medal (1970) and the Cleveland Abbe Award (1977) of the American Meteorological Society, 1970; NASA’s Public Service Medal (1980); the William Bowie Medal (1998) of the American Geophysical Union; and the Gold Medal (2004) of the International Radiation Commission. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1997.
Goody was a mountaineer and hiker throughout his life. In the 1960s, he conquered Mt. Waddington, the highest mountain in British Columbia. At 96, he still had a days-long hiking trip with his former postdoc Robert Brown in Poison Spring, Utah.
Throughout his whole career, Goody has studied the atmospheres with his shrewd physics insights and hands-on observation approaches. As Goody said himself, “I found myself cast as a specialist in atmospheric radiation, although I have never regarded the study of radiation as an end in itself but rather as a tool for understanding the atmosphere.” The community will forever remember him for the rich and far-reaching scientific legacy that he has left behind.
by Xianglei Huang