Robert D. Cess

Robert Donald Cess (March 3, 1933 – March 22, 2022) was a professor of atmospheric sciences at Stony Brook University. He was born in Portland, Oregon. Cess earned his bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Oregon State University and his master's degree from Purdue University in Indiana in 1956. His research interests involved modeling of climate feedbacks that can either amplify or diminish global climate change, and interpreting surface and satellite remote sensing data.

He was a part of studies which have found problems with the ability of model the transmission of shortwave radiation through a cloud-free atmosphere, and designed an experiment to test the accuracy of the models. They reported that they found agreement between the models and the observations of clear-sky shortwave radiation at the surface for the period studied, 1985 to 1988. Cess was a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and worked with the National Science Foundation on understanding greenhouse warming and its associated policy implications. He died on March 22, 2022, at his home in Connecticut.

Awards Cess won numerous awards, including NASA's highest scientific honor, the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, in 1989.

Selected publications