Henry Charnock CBE FRS[1] (25 December 1920 – 28 November 1997) was a British meteorologist.[2] He is well known for his work on surface roughness and wind stress over water surfaces. The now named "Charnock's relationship" describes the aerodynamic roughness length, , over a water surface by:[3]
where is the friction velocity and is the acceleration due to gravity (typically the Standard gravity). is Charnock's proportionality constant.
Charnock was President of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) from 1971 to 1975.