Veerabhadran Ramanathan

Veerabhadran Ramanathan is an Indian American climate scientist, born in 1944 in Madurai, in what was then the Madras Presidency of British India. In the mid-1970s he discovered that chlorofluorocarbons and other trace gases have a greenhouse effect, broadening the understanding of climate forcing beyond carbon dioxide alone, and he later used the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment to show that clouds exert a substantial cooling effect on the planet. Leading the Indian Ocean Experiment, he and his collaborators discovered widespread atmospheric brown clouds over the Indian Ocean region and found that the absorbing black carbon aerosols within them have masked as much as half of the surface heating caused by rising carbon dioxide.