When he was accepted into the University of Tokyo, his family expected him to study medicine, but "whenever there's an emergency, the blood rushes to my head, so I would not have made a good doctor.

In 2002 he returned to the United States as a visiting research collaborator at the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, Princeton University.

[8] As the first step, Manabe and Wetherald (1967) developed one-dimensional, single-column model of the atmosphere in radiative-convective equilibrium with positive feedback effect of water vapor.

[9] Using the model, they found that, in response to the change in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the temperature increases at the Earth's surface and in the troposphere, whereas it decreases in the stratosphere.

They used the model to simulate for the first time the three-dimensional response of temperature and the hydrologic cycle to increased carbon dioxide (Manabe and Wetherald, 1975).

[13] Manabe and Bryan's work in the development of the first global climate models has been selected as one of the Top Ten Breakthroughs to have occurred in NOAA's first 200 years.

[14] In honor of his retirement from NOAA / GFDL, a three-day scientific meeting was held in Princeton, New Jersey in March 1998.

[18] In 2018, Manabe received the Crafoord Prize in Geosciences jointly with Susan Solomon "for fundamental contributions to understanding the role of atmospheric trace gases in Earth's climate system".

[23] Shuji Nakamura, the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics awardee who also came from Ehime Prefecture and immigrated to the United States, congratulated Manabe on 6 October.