Part 2 

 COOPERATING AGENCIES AND ORGANIZATION 



TMs part concerns the arrajngesnentSj meetmgs, official letters, dis- 

 cussions and exchanges of ideas tlnat went into bringing togetker fee niaay di- 

 verse people and agencies v/iio contributed to SWOP and witkoat 'sdaose assist- 

 ance SWOP would not liave succeeded. 



Tie problem as first presented in tke faU. of 1953 was to- ©Mais aM aceiji- 



rate representation of the directional properties of real ocean waves. The 



first job was to try to find out whether ®r mot tke proposed plan was i'easifeie 



and to get and review the critical opinion of -others as to whether or not it 



needed doii^. Marks had been studying waves by stereo te-clsniques, but on a 



much reduced scale. By taking photographs from a bridge, he was able t® get 



useful data on the two«"dimensionai wave spectrum, for a rather limited fetch. 



This, however, was quite a different thing from taking stereo-photos from 



airplanes far out in the open ocean. Letters v/ere written to people doing wave 



research asking their opinion. In the replies there was general agreenient 



that a good statistical treatment of a ';^^o^e area of the sea surface was neceg" 



■ssatry before 'like airt of understanding waves could be much advanced. In a letter 



to the author in February 1954, Walter Munk, of the SIO, statisd 'that ". , « . 



the two-dimensional analysis is certainly the essential problem now. In fact, 



I have some serious doubts as to whether further extensive work on frequency 



analysis of records taken at a single point is even worthwhile. If uMte mses a 



spectral presentation of waves, one shoxild really go all the way ox mot at all. " 



3 



