A Brief Study on the Achievement of Syukuro Manabe, Awardee of 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics

Abstract

Manabe Syukuro is well known as a father of climate modeling. He and his colleagues have achieved several important milestones in the research on global warming. In this article, two highly advanced subjects are described. In the early 1960s, he developed a radiative-convective model of the atmosphere and explored the role of greenhouse gases, such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, and ozone in maintaining and changing the thermal structure of the atmosphere. His study was the beginning of long-term research on global warming. In 1969, Manabe and Bryan published the first results from a coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation model (OAGCM). However, this model used a highly idealized continent-ocean configuration. Results from the first coupled OAGCM with more realistic configurations were published in 1975, which eventually became a very powerful tool for the simulation of global warming.