Biography of Veerabhadran Ramanathan

Atmospheric brown clouds—wandering layers of air pollution as wide as a continent and deeper than the Grand Canyon—are enough to dim atmospheric physicist Veerabhadran Ramanathan's innate optimism. In fact, studying the effect of these clouds on the climate has landed him in the peculiar role of a scientist who wants to be wrong. “The most pessimistic scenario for me would be that what our model is suggesting for the future turns out to be true,” he says.

Dark particles floating throughout these brown clouds threaten to reduce rainfall, dry the planet's surface, cool its tropics, and stifle its sunlight. Yet Ramanathan, who has spent most of his career studying the atmospheric checks and balances of the Earth, does not want to wait to see what will happen. “I'm hoping that our findings will be taken as an early warning, and corrective measures taken now, so we don't have to test the model.” Ramanathan and his coauthors discuss their most recent findings about atmospheric brown clouds in his Inaugural Article in this issue of PNAS (1).

Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, Ramanathan is a distinguished professor of atmospheric sciences and the director of the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego (La Jolla, CA). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Society, and American Geophysical Union. In 2004, he was elected to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican by Pope John Paul II. Ramanathan is the current cochief scientist of the Atmospheric Brown Cloud Project, past cochief scientist of the Indian Ocean Experiment, past chief scientist of the Central Equatorial Pacific Experiment, and the principal investigator of the National Aeronautics and …