Professor Zalman Makhover: a relevant contributor to early tropopause studies

Abstract

We present an assessment of the work of Zalman Meerovich Makhover (1922-99), a leading expert on tropopause studies in the former USSR. Although a much-respected scientist among his peers, his work remains unknown, possibly as a result of much of never having been translated into English. His most important contributions were on the subject of the spatial and temporal structure of the altitude and temperature of the tropopause, as well as its variability over a range of different time scales from annual to daily. We describe the determination of the seasonal features of the tropopause and note his achievements in determining the roles of synoptic conditions and the annual cycle on tropopause characteristics. Recent tropopause research has confirmed much of his earlier work and provided important results for, among other things, stratosphere-troposphere exchange processes, climate change indicator studies, and the climatology of aircraft exhaust traces. The legacy of Makhover includes his own research on tropopause phenomena, as well as a synthesis of the numerous studies conducted by former Soviet and other researchers. Here we provide a brief biography, citation data, as well as graphical material taken from his monographs and papers.