The connection between storm surges in the North Sea and the new British Nobel Laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro
Judith Wolf, October 2017
I only met Kazuo Ishiguro’s father once. In April 1981 we both attended a session of the 5th UK Geophysical Assembly at the University of Cambridge. I was in the throes of my PhD study and looking at the effect of wind gustiness on wind-driven currents in numerical models. In our session, on “Air-Sea Interaction” there were only three of us (the third being Ed Monahan, who worked on wind waves), and being the last session on the Friday afternoon, and rather peripheral to the main topics of the conference, there were only the three of us left there to listen to each other’s presentations and dutifully ask questions. Shizuo Ishiguro’s talk was entitled “Extreme surge predictions by the quasi uniform steady wind/pressure field method” (*); he was known to me by reputation, although by this time his work was something of an anachronism, as the world had moved on to digital computers. He had built an analogue computer to model North Sea storm surges and was employed, like myself, at the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences (IOS), but based at Wormley in Surrey, while I worked at Bidston Observatory in NW England.
His storm surge calculator was an electronic analogue computer, originally developed at the Marine Observatory in Nagasaki, Japan for applications in the fishing industry. In 1957 he came to England, at the invitation of George Deacon, the Director of National Institute of Oceanography (the precursor of IOS Wormley) in Wormley after they met at a tsunami conference in Japan. Initially he was on a UNESCO fellowship, then joined the permanent staff in 1959 as an “oceanography engineer” and developed his machine to model North Sea storm surges. The calculator converted hydrographic and meteorological data into voltages and electric currents and produced output on an oscilloscope relating to the behaviour of the surge wave at coastal locations.
When he retired he took the calculating machine home and tinkered with it in his shed until his death in 2007. It is now in the mathematical collection, the Winton Gallery, in the Science Museum in London, which I visited on 1 January 2017, seeing the machine at first hand, for the first time.
Shizuo’s son, Kazuo Ishiguro, was born in Nagasaki in 1954, but moved with his family to the UK, as a boy. He has said that if he hadn’t moved to the UK he might never have become a writer.
* For more information, see http://journal.sciencemuseum.org.uk/browse/issue-06/understanding-storm-surges/.