Professor Robinson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Geophysical Union. A Tribute to Allan R. Robinson . Serious efforts to understand or influence the environment on a planetary scale must consider the vast quantities of heat and energy that ocean currents and eddies transport. The life and resources of the ocean are drastically affected by their transport of nutrients, chemicals, and particulate matter. The physics and acoustics of the sea interact symbiotically.
Sound waves propagate freely in the electromagnetically opaque ocean.
Temperature fronts associated with currents and eddies profoundly influence the transmission of sound in the sea, and such effects are influencing contemporary research in ocean physics, acoustics, and global climate. Advances continue to be made in our ability to describe, model, and predict the evolution of the flow structures and physical variabilities that occur in the sea. As a result, progress on fundamental interdisciplinary dynamical oceanic problems, identified several decades ago, is just now feasible. Professor Robinson and his colleagues have contributed significantly both to understanding the dynamics of ocean flows and to the methodology of ocean prediction. To make predictions, they carry out detailed, realistic simulations for regions of the ocean, and then embed them in larger scale simulations.