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Jule Gregory Charney was an American meteorologist who played an important role in developing weather prediction. He developed a set of equations for calculating the large-scale motions of planetary-scale waves. He gave the first convincing physical explanation for the development of mid-latitude cyclones known as the Baroclinic Instability theory. He is considered the father of modern dynamical meteorology.
Charney studied physics at UCLA where he completed his masters in 1940 and Ph.D. in 1946.
In the 1950s, he was involved in early research on numerical weather prediction together with John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He and von Neumann brought over from England a recent Ph.D. in meteorological calculations, Bruce Gilchrist, to work on this task using the institute's computer, the IAS machine. Their collective work paved the way for the founding of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
From 1956 until his death in 1981, Charney was a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1979 Charney chaired an "ad hoc study group on carbon dioxide and climate" for the National Research Council. The resulting 22-page report, "Carbon dioxide and climate: A scientific assessment", is one of the earliest modern scientific assessments about global warming. Its main conclusion can be found on page 2: "We estimate the most probable global warming for a doubling of CO2 to be near 3°C with a probable error of ± 1.5°C." This estimate of climate sensitivity has been essentially unchanged for over three decades, e.g., the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report says that "equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely to be in the range 2°C to 4.5°C, with a best estimate value of about 3°C. It is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. Values substantially higher than 4.5°C cannot be excluded, but agreement with observations is not as good for those values."
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