Syukoro Manabe

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Syukoro "Suki" Manabe is a Japanese meteorologist who pioneered the use of computers to simulate global climate change.

[edit] Scientific Accomplishments

Working at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, first in Washington, DC and later in Princeton, NJ, Manabe worked with director Joseph Smagorinsky to develop three dimensional models of the atmosphere. In 1967 he and Richard Wetherald demonstrated that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would increase the altitude at which the earth radiated heat to space. In 1969 Manabe and Kirk Bryan published the first simulations of the climate of a planet with coupled ocean and atmosphere models, establishing the role of oceanic heat transport in determining global climate. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Manabe's research group published seminal papers using these models to explore the sensitivity of Earth's climate to changing greenhouse gas concentrations. These papers formed a major part of the first global assessments of climate change published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Other important work done by Manabe included the suggestion that climate might have more than one stable state (Manabe and Stouffer, 1988) and the demonstration that switches between such states could be induced in a relatively realistic model by melting ice caps (Manabe et al., 1995).

[edit] Awards

Manabe is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and was the first recipient of the Blue Planet Prize of the Asahi Foundation.

[edit] References

Manabe, S., and R. T. Wetherald, 1967: Thermal equilibrium of the atmosphere with a given distribution of relative humidity. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 24 (3), 241-259.

Manabe, S., and R. J. Stouffer, 1988: Two stable equilibria of a coupled ocean-atmosphere model. Journal of Climate, 1(9), 841-866.

Manabe, S., and R. J. Stouffer, 1995: Simulation of abrupt climate change induced by freshwater input to the North Atlantic Ocean. Nature, 378, 165-167.