Raymond B. Montgomery papers

Raymond B. Montgomery (1910-1988) was born in Philadelphia, PA, and raised in Falmouth, MA, by his mother, Priscilla, who served as Librarian of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) library for many years. While attending Harvard University (A.B. 1932), he was one of four scientists of the first oceanographic cruise of the R/V Atlantis in 1931, the flagship of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), captained by Columbus Iselin. Montgomery earned his S.M. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1934 and his Sc. D. in oceanography from MIT in 1938.

Montgomery’s career took him to many different institutions on the east coast but he consistently was affiliated with WHOI either on the staff, as an Associate, as an Honorary Staff member, and from 1970 onward, as a member of the WHOI Corporation. From 1938-1940 Montgomery was employed by WHOI as a junior oceanographer and from 1940-1942 as a physical oceanographer. He was a professor of meteorology at New York University with Athelstan Spilhaus from 1943-1944 before going back to MIT as a staff member studying the structure of the atmosphere. Montgomery became a visiting professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1948 before accepting a position with Brown University from 1949-1954. Johns Hopkins University, where he was professor of oceanography from 1954-1975, served as his base of operations, although he took various other positions at this time as well, including a Fulbright Scholar in Australia (1958) and visiting professor at the University of Hawaii (1971).

Montgomery’s research interests were broad, but centered on equatorial currents, on the variation of the sea level, and on methods for the objective characterization of the structure of air and water masses. Additionally, he investigated turbulence in atmospheric and oceanic boundary layers, evaporation, and fog. Montgomery was one of the first to use isentropic analysis, and by using the Taylor diagram (temperature and salinity), he and his colleagues demonstrated how information about the general circulation of the ocean could be distilled from hydrographic station data. Probably his most famous achievement was his role in the discovery of the equatorial undercurrent in the Pacific on cruise 16 of the R/V Hugh M. Smith , with Townsend Cromwell and E. D. Shoup in the summer of 1952.