Vision, knowledge, intuition, ingenuity, passion—the list could go on and on and still seem inadequate to describe the talents and the rich, complex personality of Pearn Peter Niiler (b. 1937, Tartu, Estonia, and d. 2010, San Diego, California). A world-renowned authority on ocean currents, his legacy will continue to exert a profound influence on the way we observe the ocean for many years to come.

Centurioni, L., and D.-K. Lee. 2013. Introduction to the special issue on upper ocean processes: Peter Niiler’s contributions and inspirations. Oceanography 26(1):25–27, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2013.01.

Niiler, P.P. 1969. On the Ekman divergence in an oceanic jet. Journal of Geophysical Research 74(28):7,048–7,052, https://doi.org/10.1029/JC074i028p07048.
1. Niiler, P.P. 2001. The world ocean surface circulation. Pp. 193–204 in Ocean Circulation and Climate: Observing and Modelling the Global Ocean. G. Siedler, J. Church, and J. Gould, eds, International Geophysics Series, vol. 77, Academic Press.
2. Ralph, E.A., and P.P. Niiler. 1999. Wind-Driven currents in the tropical Pacific. Journal of Physical Oceanography 29:2,121–2,129, https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0485(1999)029<2121:WDCITT>2.0.CO;2

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.