Biography
He was born at Boothstown, Salford, the son of cotton-mill manager Thomas Doodson. He was educated at Rochdale secondary school and then in 1908 entered Liverpool University, graduating in both chemistry (1911) and mathematics (1912). He was profoundly deaf and found it difficult to get a job but started with Ferranti in Manchester as a meter tester. During World War I he worked on the calculation of shell trajectories.
In 1919 he moved to Liverpool to work on tidal analysis and became in 1929 the Associate Director of Liverpool Observatory and Tidal Institute. He then spent much of his life developing the analysis of tidal motions mainly in the oceans but also in lakes, and was the first to devise methods for shallow water as in estuaries. Tide height and current tables are of great importance to navigators, but the detailed motions are complex. The thorough analysis he excelled at became the international standard for the study of tides and the production of tables through the method of determination of Harmonic Elements by Least-Square fitting to data observed at each place of interest. That is, by proper association of the astronomical phases, observations made at one time can enable predictions decades away with different astronomical phases.
Doodson published a major work on tidal analysis in 1921: A. T. Doodson (1921), "The Harmonic Development of the Tide-Generating Potential", Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Vol. 100, No. 704 (Dec. 1, 1921), pp. 305–329.
This was the first development of the tide generating potential (TGP) to be carried out in harmonic form: Doodson distinguished 388 tidal frequencies. Doodson's analysis of 1921 was based on the then-latest lunar theory of E W Brown. Doodson devised a practical system for specifying the different harmonic components of the tide-generating potential, see below for the Doodson Numbers.
Doodson also became involved in the design of tide-predicting machines, of which a widely-used example was the "Doodson-Légé TPM".
Among other works, Doodson was also co-author of the "Admiralty Manual of Tides", HMSO London 1941, (Doodson A T, and Warburg H D), reprinted in 1973.
Further biographical information is available from the National Oceanography Centre, whose Liverpool facility was formerly the Liverpool Observatory and Tidal Institute, part of the UK Natural Environment Research Council, of which Doodson became director.
In May, 1933 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
Doodson died at Birkenhead 10 January 1968. He had married twice. He married firstly in 1919 Margaret, daughter of J. W. Galloway, a tramways engineer of Halifax with whom he had a daughter, who died in 1936, and a son, whose mother died shortly after his birth in 1931. He married secondly in 1933 Elsie May, daughter of W. A. Carey, who survived him.
Read more about this topic: Arthur Thomas Doodson
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