John James Barnett, a pioneer of satellite remote sounding of the atmosphere for over 40 years, died at his home in Oxford on 2 July 2010, aged 62. John was, intellectually, a gentle giant of the atmospheric community and the breadth of his contribution to the science of remote sounding was almost unique. It included the conception and design of satellite instruments, and the retrieval and interpretation of atmospheric parameters from these measurements, all motivated by his deep understanding of the broader context in which the measurements were made.
John spent essentially his entire scientific career at the University of Oxford. He joined what was then the Department of Atmospheric Physics as Clive Rodgers' research student in 1969, after graduating with first-class honours in Physics from Cambridge the same year. This was a time of high excitement: the following April, Oxford's first space instrument, the Selective Chopper Radiometer (SCR), was to be launched on NASA's Nimbus 4 spacecraft. In the data-rich times we now live in, it can be difficult to appreciate the revolution that such measurements ushered in. The SCR was to measure the temperature of the stratosphere on a global scale: previous measurements from radiosondes and rocketsondes had been, at best, sporadic in coverage. John played a key role in managing the incoming data streams and then interpreting these data. He obtained his doctorate in 1973, and published a succession of papers, including several in Nature, characterising, for example, sudden stratospheric warmings in both the Arctic and Antarctic in a way that had hitherto been impossible. He received the Society's LF