Congratulations Syukuro Manabe

28 May 2018

Together with Susan Solomon, Manabe last week received the Crafoord Prize at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. One of his many great achievements is his seminal 1967 paper on radiative convective equilibrium (RCE), together with Richard Wetherald, perhaps the most influential climate research paper of all time.

The calculation by Manabe and Wetherald stands the test of time remarkably well. They estimated 2.8 K from a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ in this very simple model. Lukas Kluft and Sally Dacie (IMPRS PhD students) repeated their calculation with a modern radiative transfer model and get essentially the same answer (2.7 K).

The figure shows RCE temperature profiles for different CO₂ concentrations from the 1967 paper (left) and their new calculation (right).