Mikhail Budyko

Who was Mikhail Budyko?

Mikhail Ivanovich Budyko was a Russian climatologist and one of the founders of physical climatology. He pioneered studies on global climate and calculated temperature of Earth considering simple physical model of equilibrium in which the incoming solar radiation absorbed by the Earth's system is balanced by the energy re-radiated to space as thermal energy.

Ethnically Belorussian, Budyko earned his M.Sc. in 1942 from the Division of Physics of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. As a researcher at the Leningrad Geophysical Observatory, he received his doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences in 1951. Budyko served as deputy director of the Geophysical Observatory until 1954, as director until 1972, and as head of the Division for Physical Climatology at the observatory from 1972 until 1975. In that year he was appointed director of the Division for Climate Change Research at the State Hydrological Institute in St. Petersburg.

Budyko's groundbreaking book, Heat Balance of the Earth's Surface, published in 1956, transformed climatology from a qualitative into a quantitative physical science.