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Wunsch "had the early insight that the ocean plays a central role in regulating Earth's climate," reads the Frontiers citation. Guided by this insight, he developed the innovative methods that allow scientists to precisely quantify the state of the ocean under a changing climate, and, in doing so, "demonstrated the need for a global ocean observing system," able to integrate observations of a diverse nature, made from space or from inside the ocean.
"Thanks to analytical methods of his devising and the global-scale oceanographic observation system he pioneered, we have been able to obtain predictions of changes in ocean dynamics, the rate of ice melt in the polar oceans, sea-level rise, and how the ocean’s heat content is changing and increasing."
"The ocean is one of the most important components of the Earth’s climate system, but it is very difficult to know what is going on beneath its surface. What Prof. Wunsch accomplished was to devise measurement systems, very ingenious ones, that give us a better understanding of how the ocean circulation works and how it takes up heat in the climate system."