Kirk Bryan Jr. (born July 21, 1929) is an American

oceanographer Oceanography (), also known as oceanology, sea science, ocean science, and marine science, is the scientific study of the ocean, including its physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. It is an Earth science, which covers a wide range of top ...

who is considered to be the founder of numerical ocean modeling. He is the son of Kirk Bryan, Sr. (geologist, 1888–1950). Starting in the 1960s at the

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) is a laboratory in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR). The current director is Venkatachalam Ramaswamy. It is one of seven ...

, then located in

Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

, Bryan worked with a series of colleagues to develop numerical schemes for solving the

equations of motion In physics, equations of motion are equations that describe the behavior of a physical system in terms of its motion as a function of time. More specifically, the equations of motion describe the behavior of a physical system as a set of mathem ...

describing flow on a sphere. His work on these schemes led to the so-called "Bryan-Cox code" with which many early simulations were made, and which led to the

Modular Ocean Model The Modular Ocean Model (MOM) is a three-dimensional ocean circulation model designed primarily for studying the ocean climate system. The model is developed and supported primarily by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administ ...

currently used by many numerical oceanographers and climate scientists. In addition to his important contributions in developing numerical codes, Bryan was also involved in early efforts to apply them to understanding the global

climate Climate is the long-term weather pattern in a region, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteoro ...

system. In 1967, he and Michael Cox published the first model of the 3-dimensional circulation of the ocean, forced by both winds and thermodynamic forcing. In 1969, a paper with

Syukuro Manabe is a Japanese– American physicist, meteorologist, and climatologist, who pioneered the use of computers to simulate global climate change and natural climate variations. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Klaus Has ...

was the first to present integrations of a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean model, demonstrating the importance of ocean heat transport to the climate. This work was named one of th
top ten breakthroughs in the history
of the

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA ) is an American scientific and regulatory agency charged with forecasting weather, monitoring oceanic and atmospheric conditions, charting the seas, conducting deep-sea exploration ...

. Bryan's 1971 paper with the noted dynamicist Adrian Gill demonstrated the important role played by bottom topography in setting the structure of the global ocean circulation, and played a major role in suggesting links between changes in continental topography and climate, continuing a long-term interest in the role of oceanic heat transport in determining global climate. Dr. Bryan was a lead author of the "Transient Climate Change" section of the 1989 scientific assessment report to the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations. Its job is to "provide governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies". The World Met ...

. Bryan has been awarded the

Maurice Ewing William Maurice "Doc" Ewing (May 12, 1906 – May 4, 1974) was an American geophysicist and oceanographer. Ewing has been described as a pioneering geophysicist who worked on the research of seismic reflection and refraction in ocean bas ...

Medal of the

American Geophysical Union The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization of Earth, Atmospheric science, atmospheric, Oceanography, ocean, Hydrology, hydrologic, Astronomy, space, and Planetary science, planetary scientists and enthusiasts that ...

for his contributions to the field of ocean science. In 2023, he was awarded the Alexander Agassiz Medal.

Notable scientific papers

* * Manabe, S.; Bryan, K. (1969),
Climate Calculation with a combined ocean-atmosphere model
" Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 26(4), 786–789, https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(1969)026<0786:CCWACO>2.0.CO;2 * *

References

External links

* http://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/breakthroughs/climate_model/welcome.html#model * http://www.agu.org/inside/honors.html#Ewing * http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibliography/results.php?author=1003
Oral History interview transcript with Kirk Bryan on 20 December 1989, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bryan, Kirk American oceanographers 1929 births Living people Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sverdrup Gold Medal Award Recipients Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni