Owen Toon

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Owen Brian Toon (born May 26, 1947 in Bethesda, Maryland ) is an American climate scientist.

Toon graduated from the University of California, Berkeley , with a bachelor's degree in 1969 and received his PhD in physics from Carl Sagan at Cornell University in 1975 . 1978-1997 he worked at the Ames Research Center of NASA . Since 1997 he has been Professor in the Department for Atmospheric and Oceanographic Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder and a fellow at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) there.

He deals with the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere (clouds and aerosols, radiation transport, dust transport from the Sahara to America). Toon and colleagues found a cooling effect if clouds contain more aerosols that serve as condensation nuclei (greater reflection of sunlight with smaller drops). He also made comparative studies of other planets such as Venus and Mars (as well as the Saturn moon Titan) and researched the climate on early Earth. His research on the immediate effects of the meteorite impact on the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary also led to the predictions of the nuclear winter with Carl Sagan and others (1983). In 2006 he presented a study that even a limited regional war with nuclear weapons could lead to high casualties due to atmospheric effects, even if it does not lead to a nuclear winter.

He has been involved in many satellite missions (both to observe the earth and planets). He is one of the most highly cited geoscientists.

He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (1990) and the American Geophysical Union (1992), whose Roger Revelle Medal he received in 2011. In 1985 he received the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award . In 1983 and 1989 he received the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award from NASA. He is an honorary doctor of the University of Southern Utah.

Fonts

  • with JB Pollack, C. Sagan, A. Summers, B. Baldwin, W. Van Camp: Volcanic explosions and climatic change: A theoretical assessment, Journal of Geophysical Research, Volume 81, 1976, pp. 1071-1083
  • with DM Hunten, RP Turco: Smoke and dust particles of meteoric origin in the mesosphere and stratosphere, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Volume 37, 1980, pp. 1342-1357
  • with TP Ackerman: Algorithms for the calculation of scattering by stratified spheres, Applied Optics, Volume 20, 1981, pp. 3657-3660
  • with Pollack, Ackerman, McKay, Turco: Environmental effects of an impact-generated dust cloud: implications for the cretaceous-tertiary extinctions, Science, Volume 219, 1983, pp. 287-289
  • with Richard P. Turco , TP Ackerman, James B. Pollack , Carl Sagan : Nuclear winter: global consequences of multple nuclear explosions, Science, Volume 222, 1983, pp. 1283-1292
  • with Turco, Ackerman, Pollack, Sagan: On a nuclear winter, Science, Volume 227, 1985, pp. 358-362
  • with CP McKay, TP Ackerman, K. Santhanam: Rapid calculation of radiative heating rates and photodissociation rates in inhomogeneous multiple scattering atmospheres, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, Volume 94, 1989, pp 16287-16301
  • with IN Sokolik: Direct radiative forcing by anthropogenic airborne mineral aerosols, Nature, Volume 381, 1996, p. 681
  • with K. Zahnle, D. Morrison, RP Turco, C. Covey: Environmental perturbations caused by the impacts of asteroids and comets, Reviews of Geophysics, Volume 35, 1997, pp. 41-78
  • with IN Sokolik: Incorporation of mineralogical composition into models of the radiative properties of mineral aerosol from UV to IR wavelengths, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, Volume 104, 1999, pp. 9423-9444
  • with AS Ackerman u. a .: Reduction of tropical cloudiness by soot, Science, Volume 288, 2000, pp. 1042-1047
  • with Douglas Robertson, Malcolm McKenna, Sylvia Hope, Jason Lillegraven: Survival in the first hours of the Kenozoic, Bull. Am. Geol. Soc., Vol. 116, 2004, p. 760
  • with Andrew S. Ackerman, Michael Kirkpatrick, David E. Stevens: The impact of humidity above stratiform clouds on indirect aerosol climate forcing, Nature, Volume 432, 2004, p. 1014
  • with F. Tian u. a .: A hydrogen-rich early Earth atmosphere, Science, Volume 308, 2005, pp. 1014-1017

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth and career data up to 2004 according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ Jim Erickson, Even limited nuclear war would have global effects, CU prof says, Rocky Mountain News, December 12, 2006 ( Memento of July 29, 2007 in the web archive archive.today )
personal data
SURNAME Toon, Owen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Toon, Owen Brian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American geophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 26, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Bethesda, Maryland