[4][5][6] He was an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Living through World War II in Japan, he recalled his two older brothers served in the Japanese military without incident, while he was drafted to work as a fireman part-time while finishing high school.
[2] In the 1950s, Arakawa developed mathematics that "permitted the use of a coarser grid" to reduce the computational time needed to estimate climate changes from air sampling data.
During this time, Arakawa consulted on the early Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) weather model, later taken up and further advanced by meteorologist Dr. James Hansen.
[10] Arakawa was one of the nine scientists who wrote the Charney report in 1979, which predicted a global warming-related temperature rise over the next century, and a climate sensitivity of 3°C.