Scientific symposium to honour MPI-M’s founding director Klaus Hasselmann

On 9 and 10 November 2011, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) hosted a scientific symposium with around 150 guests to honour the scientific work of Prof. Dr. Klaus Hasselmann, who founded the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg in 1975 and directed it until his retirement in 1999.

 

Klaus Hasselmann has made ground-breaking contributions to the understanding of the ocean-atmosphere system including the prediction of ocean waves, the origin of natural climate variability, and the modelling of the global coupled ocean-atmosphere-carbon cycle system. He is perhaps best known for his demonstration that the recent global warming trends are primarily attributable to human activities.

 

He was able to develop these insights through his unique combination of mathematical skills and deep understanding of the fundamental properties of the ocean-atmosphere-land system. This formed the basis for his development of a "fingerprinting" method that separated the influence of natural phenomena from that of anthropogenic accumulations of atmospheric greenhouse gases. This landmark research overcame the prior difficulty of discriminating between human impacts and natural contributions to observed climate change. Klaus Hasselmann's sustained efforts also have played a key role in forging a widely-recognized research community on climate change.

 

In addition to his scientific merits, the symposium's guests, among them scientific companions like Carl Wunsch, Walter Munk and Paul Crutzen, as well as former and current colleagues from MPI-M, also honoured his great sense of humour, his humanity and his courage to stand up and defend science in general and his research in particular against all kinds of resistance. His lived in accordance with his motto: "The best defence is doing good science!"

 

Klaus Hasselmann studied Physics and Mathematics at the University of Hamburg and received his PhD in Physics from the University of Göttingen in 1957. He was professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (1961 - 1964), and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Laboratory (1970 - 1972) in the USA and at the Institute of Geophysics (1973 - 1974) of the University of Hamburg. Presently he is emeritus director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.

 

During his remarkable career, Klaus Hasselmann received numerous awards for his scientific work in climate research and oceanography, e.g., the Umweltpreis of the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt in 1998. In 2002 he was awarded the Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal of the European Geosciences Union and in 2009 he received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of climate science, a highly remunerated recognition.

 

(Photos by courtesy of Michael Böttinger, DKRZ)

 

 

Contact

 

Prof. Dr. Klaus Hasselmann

Max Planck Institute for Meteorology

E-Mail

 

 

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