Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Prof. Dr Klaus Hasselmann in 2021

Prof. Klaus Hasselmann will receive the Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 together with Syukuro Manabe (USA) and Giorgio Parisi (Italy) for his contributions to the physical modelling of the Earth’s climate, the quantification of natural variability and the reliable prediction of global warming.

Prof. Klaus Hasselmann is a German physicist who has been active in ocean and climate research. He studied physics and mathematics in Hamburg and then did his doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen. After several long stays in the USA and a professorship at the University of Hamburg, he became the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) in Hamburg in 1975, which he headed until his retirement in 1999.

The development of coupled climate models driven by Hasselmann in combination with increasingly powerful supercomputers tailored to climate modelling formed the basis for numerous international scientific publications. There are 82 papers in the TIB Portal for which he was one of the authors. The most recent of these papers on scenarios for the implementation of climate policy in Europe, the USA and China appeared in 2021 (Hewitt et al., 2021). Prof. Hasselmann was also one of the authors of the first, second and third assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The climate model results that form the basis for these assessment reports have been partly archived in the WDCC (World Data Center for Climate), DKRZ’s long-term archive for scientific data. A large part of this archived research data is given a DataCite DOI. In doing so, DKRZ is following a long tradition, as DKRZ registered the first DOI for research data on 18 March 2004 as part of the DFG-funded STD-DOI project. Since then, around 6000 DOIs for research data have been assigned at DKRZ.

Anette Ganske

Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin im Projekt AtMoDat (Lab Research Data Services)