[SPA] SPA SECTION NEWSLETTER, Volume XXV, Issue 30

[Newsletter Editor]

AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
SPA SECTION NEWSLETTER
Volume XXV, Issue 30
May.21,2018

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Table of Contents

1. Passing of Professor Don Farley

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Passing of Professor Don Farley

From: David Hysell (dlh37 at cornell.edu)

Don Farley, pioneer of incoherent scatter radar theory, world leader of ionospheric research, and inspiring teacher and mentor, died peacefully in Ithaca, NY, on May 13, 2018.  He was 84.

Don entered the College of Engineering at Cornell University under a full athletic scholarship, running for the track and cross-country teams.  After receiving his B.Eng. Phys. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell, Don spent a year at Cambridge University as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow, a year as Docent at Chalmers University in Sweden, and then six years in Peru at the Jicamarca Radio Observatory, three of them as director, before returning to the United States and joining the Cornell faculty as a full professor in 1967.  He returned to Sweden in 1985 for a year as the Tage Erlander Visiting Professor at the Uppsala Ionospheric Observatory and was, in 1995, the Von Humboldt Senior Scientist at the Max-Planck Institute fur Aeronomie in Katlenberg-Lindau.  Between 1979 and 2003, he was the Principal Investigator for the NSF award supporting research at Jicamarca. Don was the J. Preston Levis Professor of Engineering in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell before becoming Professor Emeritus in 2006.

Throughout his career, Don was a pioneer in radio and space physics. His Ph.D. work considered how electrostatic fields vary along geomagnetic field lines. His best-known early-career work, however, focused on the development of incoherent scatter theory, the theory of radio wave scattering from thermal density fluctuations in ionospheric plasmas.  Incoherent scatter would become the most incisive tool available for studying ionospheric plasmas from the ground.  Don developed not only the theory but also the practical methods for ionospheric research with incoherent scatter at emerging facilities such as the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico and at the Jicamarca Radio Observatory in Peru, especially, where the effects of the earth's magnetic field require special attention.  Working at Jicamarca, Don also discovered the class of electrojet plasma waves and instabilities known now also to exist at middle and high latitudes and that now bear his name.  Don also introduced important new methods to radio science including radar interferometry which plays a key role not only in ionospheric research but also in radar studies of the mesosphere, stratosphere, and troposphere (MST).

Don was a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the American Geophysical Union, the International Scientific Radio Union (URSI), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  He received U.S. Department of Commerce Distinguished Authorship awards in 1963 and 1964 as well as the U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 1967.  He was the recipient of the 1996 URSI Sir Edward Appleton Prize, the 1997 Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal for Geophysics, and the 2010 Hannes Alfven Medal from the European Geophysical Union in addition to awards for teaching and advising at Cornell. He was the recipient of the CEDAR Distinguished Lecture in 2012:

https://cedarweb.vsp.ucar.edu/wiki/index.php/Workshop:CEDAR_Distinguished

Don was, first and foremost, a teacher and adviser whose door was never closed to his students.  Quite a few of Don's students, and some of their students, are working in radio and space physics today because of him. Don Farley was a brilliant, accomplished, and unpretentious scientist, teacher, and mentor.  He will be sorely missed.


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