Owen Toon
American academic, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences
Owen Brian Toon (born May 26, 1947 in Bethesda, Maryland) is an American professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences. He is a fellow at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received an A.B. in physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1969 and a Ph.D. in physics at Cornell University in 1975 under Carl Sagan. His research interests are in cloud physics, atmospheric chemistry, and radiative transfer. He also works on comparing Earth and other planets such as Venus.
His research on the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs led to the discovery of nuclear winter due to the major decrease in temperature. The effects of nuclear winter were re-examined in a 2006 presentation at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, where Toon and colleagues found that even a regional nuclear war could prove deadly for a large number of people. They calculated that as few as fifty detonations of Hiroshima-size bombs could kill as many as twenty million people, although it would not produce a nuclear winter. The atmospheric effects of a regional nuclear war would last several years, and would be strongest at mid-latitudes, including the United States and Europe.
He was elected a fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 1990, and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 1992.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7114661. VIAF identifies the subject as 306405923. The Library of Congress control number is n79146608. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947, 1969, 1975 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Owen Toon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.