John Latham (21 July 1937 – 27 April 2021) was a British physicist and professor emeritus at the

University of Manchester , mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity , established = 2004 – University of Manchester Predecessor institutions: 1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994) 1904 – Victoria University of Manchester 1880 – Victoria Univer ...

, known for his work on atmospheric electricity and, later in his career, climate engineering. Latham obtained a PhD on thunderstorm electrification from

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

, where he was supervised by John Mason. In 1961, he moved to Umist, now part of Manchester University, to take up a lectureship and founded the Atmospheric Physics research group. In 1988, he was hired as a senior research associate in ESSL/MMM at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of t ...

. Latham is most known for his work on thunderstorm electrification and

marine cloud brightening Marine cloud brightening also known as marine cloud seeding and marine cloud engineering is a proposed solar radiation management climate engineering technique that would make clouds brighter, reflecting a small fraction of incoming sunlight back ...

, a form of

geoengineering Climate engineering (also called geoengineering) is a term used for both carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM), also called solar geoengineering, when applied at a planetary scale.IPCC (2022Chapter 1: Introduction and F ...

which relies on

seawater Seawater, or salt water, is water from a sea or ocean. On average, seawater in the world's oceans has a salinity of about 3.5% (35 g/L, 35 ppt, 600 mM). This means that every kilogram (roughly one liter by volume) of seawater has appro ...

sprayed from ships. In collaboration with

Stephen Salter Stephen Hugh Salter, (born 7 December 1938) is Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Edinburgh and inventor of the eponymous Salter duck wave energy device. Salter is also a proponent of geoengineering and is responsib ...

he developed a scheme involving Flettner vessels. He supervised over 25 doctoral students, the first of whom was David Stow. Latham was also a talented writer. He published six collections of poetry and had radio plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

References

1937 births 2021 deaths British physicists British climatologists British poets Alumni of Imperial College London Academics of the University of Manchester People from Frodsham {{UK-physicist-stub