John Latham (physicist)
John Latham (21 July 1937 – 27 April 2021) was a British physicist and professor emeritus at the University of Manchester, 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, 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. Latham is most known for his work on thunderstorm electrification and marine cloud brightening, a form of geoengineering which relies on seawater sprayed from ships. In collaboration with Stephen Salter 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.