Manabe Syukuro

Manabe Syukuro (born September 21, 1931, Shingu, Ehime prefecture, Japan) is a meteorologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2021 for the foundational progress he and German oceanographer Klaus Hasselmann made in modeling Earth’s climate, quantifying variability, and predicting global warming. Manabe and Hasselmann shared the prize with Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi. Manabe holds dual citizenship in Japan and the United States.

Manabe received a bachelor’s degree in meteorology in 1953 from the University of Tokyo. He went on to earn master’s and doctorate degrees in meteorology from the same institution. After earning a Ph.D. in 1958, he became a research meteorologist at the U.S. Weather Bureau (later the National Weather Service), where he explored the use of physics in developing weather models. Manabe joined the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), a national research laboratory, in 1963. The GFDL began its collaboration with Princeton University in 1967 as part of the university’s Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. Manabe relocated to help lead the program that year, and in 1968 he joined the faculty at Princeton, where he served as a lecturer until 1997. He became the university’s senior meteorologist in 2005.

Manabe developed the world’s first credible three-dimensional climate model of the atmosphere in 1967. Two years later he and American oceanographer Kirk Bryan produced the first general circulation model that coupled the ocean and atmosphere. Values of several environmental variables (such as temperature, salinity, density, and the growth and retreat of pack ice) were calculated for grid points spaced 500 km (about 310 miles) apart at nine different levels in the atmosphere over a 60-year model run. The model was not complex by modern standards—it simplified the atmosphere into a single vertical column and made broad assumptions about topography and cloud cover—yet it became a useful tool for examining seasonal climate variability and global warming scenarios, including the relationships between insolation and the vertical movement of air masses and between rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and temperature.

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Manabe’s general circulation model was used to gauge the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide concentrations in 1975 in a paper he authored with American meteorologist Richard Wetherald. It predicted that doubling atmospheric carbon concentrations from 300 to 600 parts per million would result in an average temperature increase in the troposphere of between 2.3 and 2.93 °C (4.1 and 5.3 °F). These results compared well to later, more-complex general circulation models—which forecast temperature increases of between 2.5 and 4 °C (4.5 and 7.2 °F) under similar circumstances—suggesting that the simplicity of Manabe’s model did not hold it back from being an effective predictive tool.

Manabe is the recipient of the Blue Planet Prize (1992), the American Geophysical Union’s Roger Revelle Medal (1993), and the Crafoord Prize (2018), awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Manabe also authored the book Beyond Global Warming (2020) with American atmospheric scientist Anthony Broccoli.