Brief History of the Sub-department

Atmospheric Physics started at Oxford shortly after World War 1 when F. A. Lindemann was Dr Lee's Professor of Experimental Philosophy and therefore Head of the Clarendon Laboratory. Lindemann was interested in the upper atmosphere and was responsible for appointing a young scientist then at Farnborough, G. M. B. Dobson, as a University Lecturer. Together they worked on the analysis of observations of meteor trails, from which they deduced that the temperature did not decrease with altitude above the tropopause, as had previously been supposed, but rather that there was a region where temperature increased substantially with height. Dobson inferred correctly that the cause of this was heating by ozone in the stratosphere, and he set out to make measurements of the ozone amounts and their variability. In 1923 he produced the first Dobson Ozone Spectro-meter, to be succeeded in 1931 by his Spectrophotometer - a device which is still in use worldwide, with a network of over 150 instruments making daily observations. (The famous `Antarctic Ozone Hole' was discovered from data collected by one of these instruments.) For many years, `Number One' was located in Dobson's original hut on the roof of the Department. It is now in the Science Museum, South Kensington.

In 1929 Dobson became the first Reader in Meteorology, and in the same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1948 he was joined at Oxford by a new lecturer in Meteorology, A. W. Brewer, and together they made their classic study of atmospheric water vapour. The `Brewer-Dobson Circulation' is generally accepted as the breakthrough in understanding why the stratosphere is so remarkably dry. Its details are still a major subject of study to this day in Oxford and elsewhere.

After Dobson retired, Brewer became Reader, and with one of his research students, J. T. Houghton, made measurements of atmospheric radiation and radiometric measurements of water vapour from aircraft and balloons. Dr Houghton became Reader in 1963 and was appointed to a personal Chair in 1973. He expanded the Department, adding two further lecturerships, and in 1970 moved it from the Clarendon to the `Old Zoology' Building. He also introduced it into the space era, with a proposal for a radiometric temperature-sounder on the NASA (See Appendix 1 for a list of abbreviations and acronyms) satellite Nimbus D. This and subsequent Nimbus instruments flew in 1970, 1972, 1976 and 1978. In the same period an instrument (`VORTEX') was jointly developed with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and became the first temperature sounder of the planet Venus in December 1978.

F.W.Taylor was Principal Investigator for VORTEX, having gone to JPL in 1970 after completing a D.Phil.~in the Department on the development of the Pressure Modulator Radiometer. Dr Taylor returned as Acting Head of Department in 1979 when Professor Houghton went on leave of absence to head the Appleton Laboratory (now merged with Rutherford and Daresbury to form DRAL). This brought the Department a substantial involvement in two more of NASA's large space projects - the ATMOS spectrometer on the Space Shuttle and the Galileo mission to Jupiter. A large and complicated space instrument, ISAMS, was accepted for NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite. Three other major space experiments with substantial Oxford involvement began in the next few years: the ATSR, to measure sea-surface temperatures from ERS-1, the EOR mesospheric water-vapour experiment on EURECA, and the PMIRR atmospheric sounder for Mars Observer. The beginnings of the Oceanography Group (originally under Dr D. L. T. Anderson) and the Middle Atmosphere Dynamics Group (under Dr D. G. Andrews) also date from about this time.

In 1984, with Prof. (now Sir John) Houghton moving to the Meteorological Office as Director-General, Dr Taylor became Reader and Head of Department. A research team in planetary atmospheres was built up and is now one of the leading European groups. In 1987, the department was renamed and further expansion agreed.

In August 1990, Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics became formally a sub-department of the newly-unified Physics Department and Dr Taylor was appointed to the new Halley Professorship of Atmospheric Physics.

Two new lecturers were appointed in 1991, bringing a significant increase in the number of senior staff in the sub-department; another lecturer was added in 1996. The Nonlinear Systems Group, previously in the Clarendon, also joined AOPP until its transfer to the University of Manchester in 1996. The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics laboratory (led by Peter Read) was also added to the sub-Department at this time, having previously been at the Met Office and then in Oxford as part of the Hooke Institute.

Following ISAMS and ATSR in 1991, the EOR instrument was launched in July 1992 and PMIRR in September 1992. The latter was lost, with Mars Observer, a year later. It was rebuilt for the Mars Climate Orbiter, launched in December 1998 and unfortunately lost again on reaching Mars in September 1999! The CIRS instrument was built for the Cassini mission to Saturn and Titan, which was launched successfully in October 1997.

With the end of Prof Taylor's term of office as Head of the Subdepartment in 2000, Dr David Andrews took over the headship, becoming Professor in 2004. The Climate Dynamics group was also initiated at this time when Dr Myles Allen joined the Subdepartment as Lecturer, and saw the beginnings of the Climateprediction.net project.

The next major Earth observing instrument designed and constructed in Oxford was HRDLS, launched on the Aura spacecraft in 2004. Despite a problem with a blockage in its field of view, the instrument operated more or less successfully until March 2008 when the chopper experienced an anomaly.

One year later (in 2005), the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched with the Mars Climate Sounder instrument on board - the successor of the ill-fated PMIRR instruments on Mars Observer and Mars Climate Orbiter. MRO successfully reached orbit around Mars and continues to operate in 2009. In the same year, ESA launched the Venus Express orbiter, going into orbit around Venus in 2006. The Department has a strong involvement in the VIRTIS infrared instrument team.

Prof. David Marshall joined the Department in 2006, restoring oceanography to its research programme, and in 2008 Prof Peter Read took over as Head of sub-Department. 2009 saw AOPP begin a new exploration of the Moon with the launch of NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission carrying the Lunar Diviner instrument, similar in design to MCS, with the aim of searching for water ice on the Moon's surface.