Guri I. Marchuk

The 2008 Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal is awarded to Guri I. Marchuk in recognition of his pioneering contributions to numerical schemes and data initialization methods in atmospheric and oceanic sciences, and of his fundamental results in studies of the dynamics of the atmosphere.

Professor Guri Ivanovich Marchuk has made fundamental contributions to the studies of the dynamics of the atmosphere; he is a pioneer of numerical methods of the atmosphere and oceans, having introduced the splitting method, widely used today as an essential component of many atmospheric and oceanic models; he is also a pioneer of the field of adjoint modelling, used in numerous data initialization methods and also model error diagnostic schemes.

Professor Marchuk’s contributions cover both theoretical meteorology and numerical mathematics of the atmosphere and oceans. They advanced our understanding of atmospheric processes and also the mathematical tools used to solve a wide range of atmospheric and other environmental problems. This style, parallel developments in mathematics and physics, has been displayed already in early works of Professor Marchuk, for example in those on quasi-geostrophic equations of the atmospheric general circulation and their solution using the Green function method. A revolutionary contribution of Professor Marchuk and his numerous followers was the formulation, systematic development and application to a wide range of meteorological problems of the splitting method for solving the geophysical fluid dynamics equations. These contributions were made at the early times of the use of computers, and had a wide ranging impact on future developments. In another milestone series of contributions Professor Marchuk has developed an adjoint equation method for solving inverse problems of atmospheric and oceanic dynamics, including not only initialization methods but also detecting the sources of the emission of a pollutants through information about its concentration fields. Works of Professor Marchuk have strongly affected the modern state of numerical weather prediction, climate and other environmental modelling. He is one of the key founders of a new discipline within meteorology that could be called numerical meteorology.

Being a Vice-Chairman and later Chairman of the Siberian Department and Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences, G. I. Marchuk developed an extensive program aimed at extending fundamental and applied scientific investigations and training researchers. In 1986 he was elected President of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In Moscow in 1980, he organized the Department of Computational Mathematics at the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which was later transformed into the Institute of Numerical Mathematics.

Guri Marchuk has won wide ranging international recognition for his scientific activities. He is a foreign member of the Bulgarian, Czecho-Slovak, Finnish, Indian, Polish, and French Academies of Sciences; he is a honorary doctor of the Toulouse, Carlow, Dresden, Calcutta, Oregon, and Houston Universities, among others. He was awarded a Gold Medal for Services to Science and Humanity of the Czecho-Slovak Academy of Sciences, the A. Karpinskiy Medal and Prize (Germany), and an Order of the Commander of Knights of the French Legion of Honor.