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Mark A. Cane

Birth and early life

Mark A. Cane was born on 20 October 1944 in Brooklyn, New York.

  • Birth date and place: Wikidata Q58140518 — “date of birth: 20 October 1944; place of birth: Brooklyn”.
  • Grew up in Brooklyn during the Brooklyn Dodgers era (the team left for Los Angeles in 1957). His father was the principal of a vocational public high school; his mother was a school attendance officer (Earth Institute / IRI 2017 Vetlesen Prize feature by Kevin Krajick — “Cane, born in 1944, grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y.; his father was principal of a vocational public high school, his mother a school attendance officer.”).
  • The neighbourhood was Jewish, Irish, and Italian. Cane has described himself as growing up in “a very Jewish, Yiddish culture” (Forward interview, 22 April 2017).
  • High school: Midwood High School in Brooklyn, valedictorian of the June 1961 graduating class (Wikipedia: Mark Cane; confirmed in the Deep Convection oral-history summary Episode 6).

Education

From his own CV (Cane CV PDF, 15 Feb 2015):

  • Harvard College, 1961–65, A.B. Applied Mathematics (magna cum laude; Phi Beta Kappa; NSF Traineeship; Honorary John Harvard Scholarships 1962–65).
  • Harvard University, 1965–66, M.S. Applied Mathematics.
  • Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Program, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, summer 1974.
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1972–75, Ph.D. Meteorology. Thesis advisor: Jule G. Charney. Thesis: A study of the wind-driven Ocean circulation in an equatorial basin (M.I.T., 372 pp., 1975).

He was not Charney’s last student. Charney’s listed PhD students after Cane include Jagadish Shukla (1976), Inez Fung (1977), Kerry Emanuel (1978), Carlos Nobre (1983, completed under Shukla and Stone after Charney’s death), and Ted Shepherd (1984, completed under Peter Rhines) (Wikipedia: Jule Gregory Charney student list, sourced from Shukla, ed., Dynamics of Large-Scale Atmospheric and Oceanic Processes: Selected Papers of Jule Gregory Charney, A. Deepak Publishing, 2001).

Path to oceanography

Cane took several years off between his Harvard MS and starting at MIT:

  • 1966–70: Senior Programmer Analyst, Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Computer Applications Inc.)
  • 1970–72: Assistant Professor of Mathematics, New England College (Henniker, New Hampshire — described in interviews as “rural New Hampshire” (Deep Convection Episode 6)).

During his GISS years he met Charney in person — Charney was brought in as a consultant on the project Cane was working on. Cane on Charney: “And it quickly became clear that he understood how things worked. I was kind of amazed by that since I assumed nobody understood it. […] And I asked him a lot of ignorant, very ignorant questions because I had no basis for asking other than ignorant questions. And he was actually pretty patient with me looking back. I mean he wasn’t always so patient with fools but there you go.” (Deep Convection Episode 6).

Outside science, his twenties were political. He spent a summer in the U.S. South registering Black voters during the civil-rights era and protested against the Vietnam War (Forward 2017; IRI Vetlesen feature 2017 — “Deeply involved in liberal social causes, he took a long hiatus, attending civil-rights rallies, protesting the Vietnam War, and traveling the U.S. South to organize black voters.”).

Postdoc and early career

From the Cane CV:

  • 1975–76: NAS/NRC Research Associate, Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
  • 1976–78: Senior Analyst, Goddard Space Flight Center (Sigma Data Services Corp.).
  • 1976–77: Adjunct Assistant Professor of Geology, Columbia University.
  • 1977–79: Visiting Scientist, MIT (Meteorology Department).
  • 1978–79: Staff Scientist, Goddard Laboratory for Atmospheric Sciences.
  • 1979–84: Assistant and Associate Professor, MIT, Department of Meteorology and Physical Oceanography. He left after being told he would not get tenure (Deep Convection Episode 7 summary — “He had left MIT after being told that he wouldn’t get tenure. This was no doubt a difficult experience for Mark (and probably a decision MIT has come to regret).”).

Move to Lamont-Doherty

From the CV:

  • 1984: Visiting Scientist, University of Paris VI.
  • 1984–87: Senior Research Scientist, Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory.
  • 1987–97: Doherty Senior Research Scientist, Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory.
  • 1984–97: Adjunct Associate Professor and Adjunct Professor, Columbia University.
  • 1997–98: Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University.
  • 1998–present: G. Unger Vetlesen Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences, in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University.

(The 2014 Oceanography Society Fellow citation by Richard Seager states “He moved to Lamont in 1985” (Seager 2015, DOI 10.5670/oceanog.2015.21), which is approximate; the CV gives 1984.)

Key publications beyond the 1986 Nature paper

All from the Cane CV:

  • Cane, M.A., 1975: A study of the wind-driven Ocean circulation in an equatorial basin. Ph.D. thesis, MIT, 372 pp.
  • Cane, M.A., and E.S. Sarachik, 1976: Forced baroclinic Ocean motion I: The Equatorial Unbounded Case. J. Mar. Res., 34, 629–665. (Yale EliScholar)
  • Cane, M.A., and E.S. Sarachik, 1977: Forced baroclinic Ocean motion II: The Equatorial Unbounded Case. J. Mar. Res., 35, 395–432.
  • Cane, M.A., 1979: The response of an equatorial Ocean to simple wind stress patterns I: Model Formulation and Analytic Results. J. Mar. Res., 37, 233–252.
  • Cane, M.A., 1979: The response of an equatorial Ocean to simple wind stress patterns II: Numerical Results. J. Mar. Res., 37, 253–299.
  • Cane, M.A., and E.S. Sarachik, 1979: Forced baroclinic Ocean motion III: An enclosed Ocean. J. Mar. Res., 37, 355–398.
  • Cane, M.A., and S.E. Zebiak, 1985: A theory for El Niño and the Southern Oscillation. Science, 228, 1085–1087. (Science DOI)
  • Cane, M.A., 1986: El Niño. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 14, 43–70.
  • Cane, M.A., S.E. Zebiak and S. Dolan, 1986: Experimental forecasts of El Niño. Nature, 322, 827–832. (Nature DOI 10.1038/321827a0)
  • Zebiak, S.E. and M.A. Cane, 1987: A Model El Niño Southern Oscillation. Mon. Wea. Rev., 115, 2262–2278.
  • Cane, M.A., M. Münnich and S.E. Zebiak, 1990: A study of self-excited oscillations of the tropical ocean-atmosphere system. Part I. J. Atmos. Sci., 47, 1562–1577.
  • Cane, M.A., A.C. Clement, A. Kaplan, Y. Kushnir, D. Pozdnyakov, R. Seager, S.E. Zebiak, and R. Murtugudde, 1997: Twentieth-century sea surface temperature trends. Science, 275, 957–960.
  • Cane, M.A. and P. Molnar, 2001: Closing of the Indonesian Seaway as a precursor to east African aridification around 3–4 million years ago. Nature, 411, 157–162.
  • Chen, D., M.A. Cane, A. Kaplan, S.E. Zebiak and D.J. Huang, 2004: Predictability of El Niño over the past 148 years. Nature, 428, 733–736.
  • Sarachik, E.S. and M.A. Cane, 2010: The El Niño-Southern Oscillation Phenomenon, Cambridge University Press, 384 pp.
  • Hsiang, S., K. Meng, and M.A. Cane, 2011: Civil conflicts are associated with the global climate. Nature, 476, 438–441.
  • Kelley, C., S. Mohtadi, M. Cane, R. Seager, Y. Kushnir, 2015: Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.

Total: more than 250 papers; over 22,600 citations as of late 2015 (h-index 75) (Wikipedia).

Awards and honours (verified)

From the Cane CV, Wikipedia, and NAS directory:

  • 1984–86: NSF Creativity Award.
  • 1992: Sverdrup Gold Medal, American Meteorological Society — “for the insight provided in his many theoretical studies of large-scale air–sea interaction” (Sverdrup Gold Medal Wikipedia list).
  • 1993: Fellow, American Meteorological Society.
  • 1995: Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
  • 1995: Fellow, American Geophysical Union.
  • 2002: Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
  • 2003: Cody Award in Ocean Sciences, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
  • 2009: Norbert Gerbier-MUMM International Award, World Meteorological Organization.
  • 2013: Maurice Ewing Medal, American Geophysical Union.
  • 2013: Member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences (Section 16: Geophysics) (NAS directory entry).
  • 2014/2015: Fellow, The Oceanography Society — citation: “for contributions to the understanding and prediction of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the tropical oceans and their effects on climate and society” (Seager 2015, Oceanography 28(1):8–9).
  • 2017: Vetlesen Prize (shared with S. George Philander), $250,000, awarded by the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation through Lamont-Doherty (IRI/Earth Institute press release, 23 Jan 2017). Past Vetlesen recipients have included J. Tuzo Wilson, Jan Oort, Wallace Broecker, and Walter Alvarez.

IRI

From IRI/Earth Institute, 23 Jan 2017 and State of the Planet, 30 Sept 2022:

  • IRI began as a NOAA pilot project in 1994.
  • Cane led the establishment of Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) in 1996, as a cooperative agreement between NOAA’s Climate Program Office and Columbia.
  • Seager 2015 says Cane “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).”
  • Cane’s CV shows: Member, IRI Executive Committee, 1996–99; IRI International Science and Technical Advisory Committee, 2000–01 and 2003–; Chair, IRI Management Board, 2010–13.
  • Stephen Zebiak became director-general of IRI 2003–12.

Current status (2026)

  • Alive. Wikipedia categorises him as “Living people” (last edited 31 March 2026).
  • Title: G. Unger Vetlesen Professor Emeritus of Earth and Climate Sciences and of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia; Special Research Scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (Lamont directory; confirmed in 2025-vintage searches against Lamont, the Climate School, and the EESC department pages).

Family

  • Wife: not named in any public source I could find.
  • Children: at least one child mentioned in a 2017 interview (“dangerous for the planet, for my children, and for your children and grandchildren” — Forward 2017).
  • Grandchildren named in print: Melech Mahalel and Charlotte Cane, mentioned in Richard Seager’s 2014 Oceanography Society Fellow citation: “Mark Cane enjoying time with his grandchildren, Melech Mahalel and Charlotte Cane” (Seager 2015).

Personal style and characterisations

From people who worked with him:

  • Richard Seager (his former student), 2015: “In all cases, he has applied his piercing intellect, deep intuition, and methodological rigor to make major advances… he has produced both a series of mathematically 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) prediction can thank Mark for his unique ability to combine brilliant theories with utter pragmatism.” (Seager 2015)
  • Seager again, comparing Cane to L.F. Richardson: “Mark reminds us of one of his heroes, L.F. Richardson, who, in *Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), presented a visionary idea of computational fluid dynamics and computer weather prediction long before computers existed, and who also wrote Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1960). Richardson’s career is an excellent point of comparison to Mark’s, and Mark’s has been equally as distinguished, innovative, wide-ranging, and impressive.”* (Seager 2015)

Other anecdotes

  • The 1986 forecast was deliberately publicised. As Cane himself put it: “The fact that it worked as soon as we started doing realistic things actually added to the sense of confidence. […] We had sweated to make the model work but not to make the forecast work. So I was fairly confident. And one thought, I thought, and others, that okay, this could do some good if we’re right and people paid attention.” (Deep Convection Episode 7 summary, May 2020)
  • On the political response: “Some people got upset at the idea that we were going public, because in those days, unlike now, climate science wasn’t at all politicized. Some people thought you shouldn’t even talk to the public, basically.” (Forward 2017)
  • On naïveté at IRI’s founding: “We’re scientists. We were very naive, and we put the forecasts out there with a sort of attitude of, well, ‘If you build it, they will come.’” (State of the Planet, 30 Sept 2022)
  • His date with the model in 1986 — Seager’s framing: “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 question is that, in the winter of 1986/87 when Mark summoned forth an El Niño from the tropical Pacific Ocean, it did indeed come.” (Seager 2015)

Unverified or partially verified

  • Exact form of the Brooklyn family name’s path — no publicly available genealogy details.
  • Wife’s name and children’s names — never given in any source I found.
  • IPCC involvement — Cane has not been a lead author on any IPCC assessment report I can confirm, and his CV (2015) does not list IPCC service among “Selected Professional Activities”. His CV does list extensive WCRP/CLIVAR/TOGA/PAGES service.
  • VAX 11/780 specifically — multiple secondary sources state Cane and Zebiak ran the early ENSO model on a Lamont departmental DEC VAX, but no primary source I located names “11/780” specifically. The 1986 Nature paper does not name the computer in its abstract or methods that I could read; full-paper access was paywalled.