Jagadish Shukla's multifaceted career has found success across the continents both in science and service to society.

Weather to Change

In an extraordinary life and career that began in a small impoverished village in eastern India and continues to unfold today in suburban Washington, DC, Jagadish Shukla has applied his diverse talents and skills over the past four decades to scientific research, scientific institution building and service to society, pursuing his broad ambitions on three continents---North America, Europe and Asia.
At ICTP, Jagadish Shukla is best known for launching and then heading the Centre's Weather and Climate research and training activities from their inception in 1988 until Filippo Giorgi assumed responsibility for this initiative in 1997.
Yet Shukla has also distinguished himself as a scientist who has divided his time over the past two decades between George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he is chairman and professor of climate dynamics, and the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmospheric Studies (COLA) in Calverton, Maryland, USA, a nonprofit research centre that receives more than US$3 million in annual funding from the US National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Shukla founded and now directs the internationally recognised Center, which currently has a staff of 25 scientists and 15 doctoral students.
More recently, Shukla has decided to devote a small portion of his time and money to his native village of Mirdha, situated in India's most populous state Uttar Pradesh, home to 200 million people, which would make it the fifth most populous country in the world if it were an independent nation.
Shukla's education began modestly. "My first lessons," he recalls, "took place in the open under a banyan tree. In the fifth grade I attended a one-room school house built with the help of my father. And from the sixth to the tenth grade, I walked 10 kilometres each day to attend secondary school, where I studied Hindi, Sanskrit and mathematics. Science was not part of the curriculum."
A summer of intense reading of grade-school textbooks in science, which his father encouraged him to do, allowed Shukla to do well enough to pass the entrance examination for admission to the eleventh-grade science class in the city of Balbia. For his undergraduate and graduate education, he went to Benares Hindu University where he ultimately earned a doctorate in geophysics.
Shukla was destined to lead a conventional life as a government employee in India (upon graduation, he obtained a civil service position in Pune) when a last minute trip to Japan to attend a conference transformed his career. There the 24-year-old Shukla met Jule Charney, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, and, at the time, the world's most eminent meteorologist.
"For reasons that remain unclear to this day, Charney came to me and began to discuss my presentation. This chance encounter with a world-class scientist ultimately led to a doctorate in meteorology at MIT."
Shukla's studies and, more importantly, modelling experiments at MIT and subsequently at NASA led him to a breakthrough concept in climate predictability. "No one," he explains, "can predict the weather beyond five to 10 days. Yet, ironically, climate is predictable. In other words, science cannot tell you what the temperature will be two weeks from now but science can be used to predict what the mean seasonal temperature will be six months from now." Shukla's investigations, conducted during the 1980s, were among the first to prove this point.
The reason that such calculations can be made is that changes in the ocean temperatures directly affect the temperature of the air locally as well as globally. Using a deep understanding of the physics of climate and feeding large quantities of data into state-of-the-art computers, scientists can integrate complex mathematical models to simulate and predict climate variations.
"The temperature ties between the oceans and land and the overlying atmosphere are strongest in tropical regions near the equator, which makes tropical climate variations far more predictable than other regions," Shukla observes. "This relationship is a 'gift of nature' that many developing countries have not been able to take advantage of because they lack the scientific expertise and resources to do so."
That was the explanation Shukla gave to Abdus Salam during a conversation in 1992 that soon led to a series of ICTP workshops and conferences in the physics of weather and climate and ultimately to the creation of today's Physics of Weather and Climate group.
"The initiative," explains Shukla, "was designed both to build scientific capacity in the physics of weather and climate in the developing world and to make the information gathered by scientists available to countries that could then put the information to work to improve crop yields, for example."
Soon after he relinquished responsibility for the Centre's weather and climate activities, Shukla embarked on yet another 'adventure' when he decided to "give something back" to the village of Mirdha where he grew up and where most of his family, including his brother Shri Ram, still lives.
Why does he lend a helping hand to his home village? "My efforts are not only intended to improve the lives of people in Mirdha but also to alter the mindset: to show people that change is possible and that some degree of change can be good." To advance his goals, Shukla has recently decided to devote 10 percent of his time in Mirdha, matching his previous commitment of 10 percent of his salary.
"Giving of myself has more been difficult than giving my money," he admits. "After five days at a house without electricity or running water, I often find myself looking for a comfortable hotel. Change is difficult but possible," he notes, "and I'm the living proof that change changes us all."

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