Background
His father, Herbert Niiler, coached the Estonia national basketball team at the 1936 Olympic Games and later ran a Young Men’s Christian Association camp near Zelienople, Pennsylvania
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Pearn Niiler
Edit ProfileEducation
Peter Niiler studied engineering at Lehigh University and graduated in 1960. In 1964 he received doctorate from Brown University where he studied applied mathematics and fluid mechanics. He was a Fulbright fellow at Cambridge University and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.
In 1966, he joined Nova University where he studied the Florida Current and the Gulf Stream.
Career
He became professor of oceanography at Oregon State University in 1974. He become professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1982 where he worked in the Physical Oceanography Research Division. He was a Scripps Distinguished Professor.
Beginning in 2002, Niiler became involved in tropical hurricane research and his group deployed the first groups of thermistor chain drifters before approaching hurricanes.
His final field project was related to tropical hurricanes influence on ocean mixing in the Western Pacific. The project was ongoing when he died, and he coordinated deployment of the thermistor chain drifters of his design during that project
His thermistor chain drifters sampled Typhoon Fanapi in September 2010. Niiler was particularly interested in typhoon cold wake to study relaxation of the mixed layer temperature after cyclone passage.
His interests included measurements of flow and theory of variability of eastern boundary current systems, relationship of heat flux to global sea surface temperature variability, Lagrangian circulation measurements in mixed layers of the world ocean, and response of upper ocean to tropical storms.
He was named fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 1986. He was a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1979. They divorced in 1974.
Their daughter is Ashley.
According to Scripps News "He had a passion for architecture and designed numerous homes and several buildings. He played a leading role in creating the distinctive design of the West.M. Keck Foundation Center for Ocean Atmosphere Research, in which his office was housed.
