Syukuro Manabe

Princeton University

Syukuro Manabe is a senior meteorologist at Princeton University and a pioneer of physical climate modeling who shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for the physical modeling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming. In the 1960s, working at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Manabe built the first radiative-convective models of the atmosphere that correctly captured the vertical temperature structure and demonstrated, decades ahead of the political conversation, that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would raise global surface temperatures by several degrees while cooling the stratosphere — a signature later confirmed by observations. He went on to develop some of the earliest coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models, the direct ancestors of the comprehensive Earth-system models that now inform Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments and national climate policy. Manabe's insistence on grounding climate projection in first-principles physics, rather than statistical extrapolation, established the methodological foundation for the entire field of computational climate science. His career bridged Japanese and American meteorology and trained numerous leaders in numerical modeling. For suppliers of high-performance computing, atmospheric instrumentation, and geophysical data products, Manabe's legacy anchors a research community with sustained federal funding and intensive demands for large-scale simulation infrastructure.