Spanish atmospheric physicist and industrial engineer (1941-2024), born in Granada, who directed the Centro de Estudios Ambientales del Mediterráneo (CEAM) in Valencia from 1991 to 2012. Millán Millán’s work on Mediterranean atmospheric dynamics, pollutant dispersion and the regional water cycle underlies the “two-legged” climate thesis the wiki discusses on Bioprecipitation. He died in Valencia on 12 January 2024.
Contribution
Millán trained in atmospheric physics at the University of Toronto (PhD 1972) and later took an engineering doctorate in Bilbao (1986). In Canada he designed the COSPEC correlation spectrometer, an early commercial instrument for measuring moving pollutant plumes in real time. From the mid-1970s he advised the European Commission on environment and climate research and helped set priorities for several of its framework programmes. He also sat on the board of the European Science Foundation.
At CEAM he studied why summer storms on the Western Mediterranean coast had declined. His mesoscale work (Journal of Climate, 2005; Journal of Hydrology, 2014) attributed the loss to coastal urbanization and the destruction of vegetation, which disrupted the sea-breeze circulation that recycled moisture inland and raised the cloud condensation level above the mountain crests. The “two-legged” thesis names two drivers acting together: greenhouse-gas warming, and the land-use and water-cycle changes that follow vegetation loss. His colleague Juli Pausas wrote that Millán quantified the annual rainfall the Valencian coast had lost to land misuse.
The wiki takes the thesis as well supported for the Western Mediterranean and for tropical and continental-interior moisture recycling. It does not extend it to the winter-rainfall Cape, where frontal systems and atmospheric rivers dominate rainfall.
Selected works
- Millán, M.M. et al. (2005). “Climatic feedbacks and desertification: the Mediterranean model.” Journal of Climate, 18, 684-701.
- Millán, M.M. (2014). “Extreme hydrometeorological events and climate change predictions in Europe.” Journal of Hydrology.
- Pausas, J.G. & Millán, M.M. (2019). “Greening and browning in a climate change hotspot: the Mediterranean Basin.” BioScience.
Related pages
Sources
- Millán Millán, Wikipedia
- J.G. Pausas, obituary for Millán Millán, January 2024
- Millán et al. (2005), Journal of Climate (UNCCD library PDF)
Provenance
Written 23 October 2026 from the people named on Bioprecipitation, using published obituaries, institutional records and published work.