Oceanography | Vol.28, No.1
Mark Cane
2014 Fellow of The Oceanography Society
Contributed by Richard Seager
Mark Cane, who was honored in 2014 as
a Fellow of The Oceanography Society, is
the G. Unger Vetlesen Professor of Earth
and Environmental Sciences at Columbia
University, based at Columbia’s Lamont-
Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades,
New York. He received a bachelor’s degree
from Harvard in 1965 and his PhD from
MIT in 1975. He moved to Lamont in
1985 and has made his research home
there ever since. His unusual career has
ranged from theoretical equatorial ocean
dynamics to studying links between cli-
mate variability and social conflict. In all
cases, he has applied his piercing intel-
lect, deep intuition, and methodological
rigor to make major advances in under-
standing of the ocean, the climate sys-
tem, and how climate variability and
change impact human society. In partic-
ular, Mark Cane is a founding father of
seasonal-to-interannual climate predic-
tion, a revolutionary field in ocean and
climate science.
Mark’s earliest contributions were
among his most fundamental when, work-
ing with Ed Sarachik, he developed the
theory of equatorial ocean wave dynam-
ics in a series of papers of tremendous
mathematical ingenuity and elegance.
This was a major advance in geophysi-
cal fluid dynamics that, perhaps unbe-
knownst to Mark at the time, also paved
the way for development of seasonal-
to-interannual prediction. By the early
1980s, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation
(ENSO) had grabbed people’s attention,
but, despite Bjerknes’ pioneering work
on positive tropical atmosphere-ocean
feedbacks, there was no understanding
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of how the system oscillated between
El Niños and La Niñas.
Mark and his graduate student, Steve
Zebiak, set about building a numerical
model of the tropical Pacific atmosphere-
ocean system using an ocean model based
on Mark’s earlier equatorial wave theory.
The Zebiak-Cane model simulated ENSO
with a quite remarkable degree of real-
ism, partly because of the clever and wise
choice to construct the model as a lin-
earization about the observed climato-
logical mean basic state. State-of-the-art
coupled models retain notorious tropical
biases, and Mark’s decision to bypass that
whole matter probably advanced predic-
tion by a couple of decades. This decision
reflects his great dexterity and flexibility
in approaching scientific investigation:
he produced both a series of mathemati-
cally elegant and highly formal papers on
wave dynamics and a model that drew on
that work but, by necessity, introduced
simplifications and fixes that could only
be justified with intuition and after-the-
fact proof that the model worked. The
field of seasonal-to-interannual (S/I) pre-
diction can thank Mark for his unique
ability to combine brilliant theories with
utter pragmatism.
Before fully understanding the phys-
ical basis for the growth and decay of
El Niño events, Mark and Steve applied
the model to hindcasting past El Niños,
initializing them with sea surface tem-
perature anomalies seasons in advance
of the event. Because this proved suc-
cessful, they then, in a bold (and some
said rash) move, in summer 1986 pub-
lished and disseminated a prediction of
the 1986/87 El Niño event. In Henry IV
Part I, Glendower says, “I can call spirits
from the vasty deep,” to which Hotspur
retorts, “Why, so can I, or so can any
man; But will they come when you do
call for them?” The answer to that ques-
tion is that, in the winter of 1986/87 when
Mark summoned forth an El Niño from
the tropical Pacific Ocean, it did indeed
come. And it was not a flash in the pan
but the birth of S/I prediction, Mark’s
baby, a startling success that revolution-
ized climate science.
Mark realized the potential of what
he had unleashed, and putting his deep
sense of social justice into practice,
joined with Ed Sarachik to spearhead
the creation by the US National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration of
the International Research Institute for
Climate Prediction (now IRI for Climate
and Society). IRI was and remains unique
in that its work involves not just S/I pre-
diction but also application of the predic-
tions to problems in such areas as agri-
culture, water resources, hazards, and
public health across the world, with a spe-
cial focus on the developing world. From
its pilot project days in the early 1990s
to the large and dynamic organization it
is now, IRI proves the value of seamless
prediction and adaptation where climate,
agricultural, and health scientists, along
with others, work side by side and where
oceanographic and atmospheric research
inform and are informed by on-the-
ground decision making in, say, tropical
Africa. In 1979 when Mark was writing
“Forced Baroclinic Ocean Motions III:
The Linear Equatorial Bounded Case”