From Decoding Turbulence to Unveiling the Fingerprint of Climate Change

Klaus Hasselmann was born in Hamburg in 1931. His family fled to England in 1934 because of the Nazis, so he grew up in an English-speaking environment, and returned to Hamburg after the war, where he studied physics, started a family, and became an innovative researcher. Later, he spent several years in the United States of America, but always returned to Hamburg, where he became the founding director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie in 1975. His Institute soon became one of the world’s leading research facilities in the field of climate science. He retired in 2000, but continued his work in climate science as a “grey eminence” in the background, whilst his heart and mind turned to particle physics. He recently turned 90, and we—a group of former co-workers, scientific friends and colleagues—decided that we had to tell the story of this remarkable man. One of the challenges we were faced with was the sheer breadth of interest and commitment of Klaus’s career. In this section, we shall attempt to evaluate his achievements as a Naturwissenschaftler1 (Sect. 1.2), an enabler (Sect. 1.3), and as a public figure (Sect. 1.4). Klaus himself will have his say in Chap. 2 in which we reproduce an interview from 2007 as well as a recent brief addition to it, and a chat between two Hasselmann acolytes, Dirk Olbers and Hans von Storch in May 2021. His key scientific achievements, which are summarised in Sect. 1.2, are discussed and evaluated in some detail in Chap. 3 in which a number of his original texts, some in German, are reproduced. In Chap. 4, some of Klaus’ former co-workers and colleagues present their personal accounts and memoirs of what it was like to work with him: the reader will see a certain amount of overlap between the different accounts— recurrent themes include his personal friendliness but also his sometimes-rude insistence on scientific rigour. But the various accounts differ in terms of content, and the scientific issues addressed. Reading these accounts will give the reader an insight into the variety of endeavours, interests and successes of this man. The final Chap. 5 includes an overview of his major publications, awards and a CV.

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