Syukuro Manabe
Japanese–American meteorologist and climatologist
- 3 min read
- 3 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Americans, Climate change and Climate variability and change
Early life and education
Born in 1931 in Shinritsu Village, Uma District, Ehime Prefecture, Japan. Both his grandfather and his father were physicians, who operated the only clinic in the village. A classmate recalled that, even in elementary school, he was already "interested in the weather, making comments such as 'If Japan didn't have typhoons, we wouldn't have so much rain.'" Manabe attended Ehime Prefectural Mishima High School. When he was accepted into the University of Tokyo, his family expected him to study medicine, but "whenever there's an emergency, the blood rushes to my head, so I would not have made a good doctor." Furthermore, "I had a horrible memory and I was clumsy with my hands. I thought that my only good trait was to gaze at the sky and get lost in my thoughts." He joined the research team of Shigekata Shono (1911–1969), and majored in meteorology. Manabe received a BA degree in 1953, an MA degree in 1955, and a DSc degree in 1958, all from the University of Tokyo.
Sign in to keep reading
2 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
Career
After finishing his doctorate, Manabe went to the United States to work at the General Circulation Research Section of the U.S. Weather Bureau, now the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of NOAA, continuing until 1997. From 1997 to 2001, he worked at the Frontier Research System for Global Change in Japan serving as Director of the Global Warming Research Division. In 2002 he returned to the United States as a visiting research collaborator at the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, Princeton University. He currently serves as senior meteorologist at the university. He also engaged as a specially invited professor at Nagoya University from December 2007 to March 2014.
Scientific accomplishments
Working at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, first in Washington, DC and later in Princeton, New Jersey, Manabe worked with director Joseph Smagorinsky to develop three-dimensional models of the atmosphere. As the first step, Manabe and Wetherald (1967) developed a one-dimensional, single-column model of the atmosphere in radiative-convective equilibrium with positive feedback effect of water vapor. Using the model, they found that, in response to the change in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the temperature increases at the Earth's surface and in the troposphere, whereas it decreases in the stratosphere.
The development of the radiative-convective model was a critically important step towards the development of comprehensive general circulation model of the atmosphere (Manabe et al. 1965). They used the model to simulate for the first time the three-dimensional response of temperature and the hydrologic cycle to increased carbon dioxide (Manabe and Wetherald, 1975). In 1969, Manabe and Bryan published the first simulations of the climate by a coupled ocean-atmosphere models, in which the general circulation model of the atmosphere is combined with that of ocean.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Manabe's research group published seminal papers using the coupled atmosphere ocean models to investigate the time-dependent response of climate to changing greenhouse gas concentrations of the atmosphere (Stouffer et al., 1989; Manabe et al., 1991 & 1992). They also applied the model to the study of past climate change, including the role of freshwater input to the North Atlantic Ocean as a potential cause of the so-called, abrupt climate change evident in the paleoclimatic record (Manabe and Stouffer, 1995 & 2000).
For further details, see Selected publications.