Mark A. Cane

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Mark A. Cane (born October 20, 1944 in Brooklyn ) is an American climate scientist and oceanographer, known for research on El Niño , in particular the first numerical prediction of the phenomenon in the 1980s.

Life

Cane, the son of a school principal, studied mathematics at Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in 1965 and a master's degree in 1966 and was then very active in the civil rights movement (organizing African-American voters in the southern states) and in anti-Vietnam war protests, which is why he took a break as a scientist. 1966 to 1970 he was a mathematician at Computer Applications Inc., 1970 to 1972 Assistant Professor of Mathematics at New England College, 1975/76 Fellow in Oceanography of the National Research Council and 1976 to 1978 analyst at Sigma Data Services Inc. In 1975 he became at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) PhD in Meteorology. 1977/78 he was adjunct professor in the Faculty of Geosciences at Columbia University and 1978/79 scientist in the field of oceanography at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center . In 1979 he became an assistant professor at MIT and later an associate professor. From 1984 to 1987 he was a scientist (from 1987 Senior Scientist) at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and he is an adjunct professor at Columbia University.

He develops climate models and deals in particular with the mutual interaction of ocean currents and winds. Independent of S. George Philander , he was significantly involved in the elucidation of the El Nino phenomenon in the Pacific and the Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in general . With his student Stephen Zebiak, he used the data of the strong El Nino from 1982/83 to predict an El Nino for 1986 with his model, which initially failed to appear but came later in the year. The further improved model also predicted other El Ninos like the particularly strong ones from 2015/16. Observation buoys were installed in the Pacific for the data and his models, which he and others have further developed, serve as the basis for the El Nino forecast in many countries. He himself founded the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University in 1996 , but he also helped establish such forecasting centers in developing countries.

In 1994 he and his student Gideon Eshel found a connection between El Nino and the yields of maize harvests in Zimbabwe, which showed that the effect had effects as far as Africa. In 2011 he warned of civil wars in areas affected by extreme weather conditions as a result of El Nino, and in 2015 he published an essay in which he attributed the Syrian civil war to climate shifts related to global warming. He also deals with explanations of abrupt climatic fluctuations over the past thousand years through models.

In 1982 he was visiting professor at the Natural History Museum in Paris and from 1991 visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory .

In 2017 he and S. George Philander received the Vetlesen Prize for their research on El Nino. In 1992 he received the Sverdrup Gold Medal of the American Meteorological Society , of which he is a fellow, and in 2013 the Maurice Ewing Medal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the AGU. In 2002 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and in 2013 to the National Academy of Sciences .

Fonts (selection)

Except for the works cited in the footnotes.

  • with Edward Sarachik: The El Niño-Southern oscillation phenomenon, Cambridge UP 2010
  • Oceanographic events during El Nino, Science, Vol. 222, 1983, pp. 1189-1195
  • with SE Zebiak: A Theory for El-Niño and the Southern Oscillation. Science, Volume 228, 1985, pp. 1085-1087.
  • with SE Zebiak, SC Dolan: Experimental Forecasts of El-Niño. Nature, Vol. 321, 1986, pp. 827-832.
  • El Niño. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Volume 14, 1986, pp. 43-70.
  • with Zebiak: A Model El Niño-Southern Oscillation, Monthly Weather Review, Volume 115, 1987, pp. 2262-2278
  • with TP Barnett, Zebiak. u. a .: On the prediction of the El Niño of 1986-1987. Science, Volume 241, 1988, pp. 192-196.
  • with E. Tziperman, L. Stone, H. Jarosh: El Nino chaos: Overlapping of resonances between the seasonal cycle and the Pacific ocean-atmosphere oscillator, Science, Volume 264, 1994, pp. 72-74
  • with AC Clement, A. Kaplan, Y. Kushnir u. a .: Twentieth-century sea surface temperature trends, Science, Volume 275, 1997, pp. 957-960
  • with A. Kaplan, Y. Kushnir, AC Clement, M. Benno Blumenthal, Balaji Rajagopalan: Analyzes of global sea surface temperature 1856-1991, Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, Volume 103, 1998, pp 18567-18589
  • with M. Latif u. a .: A review of the predictability and prediction of ENSO, Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, Volume 103, 1998, pp. 14375-14393
  • with AC Clement, R. Seager: Orbital controls on the El Nino / Southern Oscillation and the tropical climate, Paleoceanography, Volume 14, 1999, pp. 441-456
  • with KK Kumar, B. Rajagopalan: On the weakening relationship between the Indian monsoon and ENSO, Science, Volume 284, 1999, pp. 2156-2159
  • with L. Goddard, SJ Mason, SE Zebiak, CF Ropelewski, R. Basher: Current approaches to seasonal to interannual climate predictions, International Journal of Climatology, Volume 21, 2001, pp. 1111-1152
  • with P. Molnar: Closing of the Indonesian seaway as a precursor to east African aridification around 3–4 million years ago, Nature, Volume 411, 2001, pp. 157–162
  • with D. Chen, A. Kaplan, SE Zebiak, D. Huang: Predictability of El Niño over the past 148 years, Nature, Volume 428, 2004, pp. 733-736
  • with ER Cook, R. Seager, DW Stahle: North American drought: reconstructions, causes, and consequences, Earth-Science Reviews, Volume 81, 2007, pp. 93-134

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004 (corrected using the data on his homepage).
  2. ^ MA Cane, G. Eshel, RW Buckland: Forecasting Zimbabwean Maize Yield Using Eastern Equatorial Pacific Sea-Surface Temperature. Nature, Volume 370, 1994, pp. 204-205
  3. ↑ S. Hsiang, K. Meng, MA Cane: Civil conflicts are associated with the global climate. Nature, Volume 476, 2011, pp. 438-441
  4. ↑ CS Kelley, S. Mohtadi, MA Cane, R. Seager, Y. Kushnir: Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, Volume 112, 2015, pp. 3241-3246
  5. ^ Link to his list of publications, Columbia University
personal data
SURNAME Cane, Mark A.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American climate researcher and oceanographer
DATE OF BIRTH October 20, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn