Munk, Walter -

(born 1917): Austrian-American oceanographer and currently a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in 1947 at UCLA with Harald Sverdrup (see entry below) as his advisor and served as director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics from 1960 to 1982 at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His major contributions are to the understanding of ocean circulation, waves and tides. He is also co-originator of the ATOC project, a large-scale experiment that began in 1995 to measure the warming of the ocean by recording changes in sound velocity within it over large distances.