Scripps Administration

Director Tony Haymet

For 50 years, Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been a leader in climate science. Many of Scripps's accomplishments in climate research seem commonplace today, but were ground-breaking-even controversial-at the time they were first reported.

In 1956, Charles D. Keeling came to Scripps and began his historic series of measurements documenting increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The following year, Hans Suess and Roger Revelle published their landmark paper stating that the oceans could not absorb all of the carbon dioxide being added by human activities. In the 1960s and '70s Jerome Namias demonstrated the key role the oceans play in climate, laying the groundwork for the first predictions of El Niño events.

Climate studies at Scripps took on a larger scale with the North Pacific Experiment in the 1970s, the first major research program uniting meteorologists and oceanographers to analyze interactions between the ocean and atmosphere over long periods of time in large areas of ocean.

In the 1980s, Tim Barnett was making mathematical and physical models of El Niño, and in the 1990s, Scripps climate scientists began making computer forecasts of climate phenomena.

Today, Scripps is pursuing climate research from theory and modeling to new measurement methods to ways the changing climate is guiding the decisions of California's water managers.

With its widely varied climate and growing population, California will continue to be the source of research and policy decisions that will impact the rest of the nation. As many have remarked, the story of California is a story of water. So it is with Scripps: ours is a story of water, fresh and salty.