Professional Background and Climate Research
1955, University of Hamburg, Physics and Mathematics, Diplom. Thesis: Isotropic Turbulence.
1957, University of Göttingen and Max Planck Institute of Fluid Dynamics, PhD Physics.
1964 - 1975, University of Hamburg, ending as Full Professor for Theoretical Geophysics and Managing Director, Institute of Geophysics at the University of Hamburg.
From February 1975 to November 1999, Hasselmann was Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, Hamburg. Between January 1988 and November 1999 he was Scientific Director at the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ, Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum), Hamburg. Currently he is Vice-Chairman of the European Climate Forum. The European Climate Forum has been founded in September 2001 by Prof. Carlo Jaeger and Prof. Klaus Hasselmann.
He has published papers on climate dynamics, stochastic processes, ocean waves, remote sensing, and integrated assessment studies.
His reputation in oceanography was primarily founded on a set of papers on non-linear interactions in ocean waves. In these he adapted Feynman diagram formalism to classical random wave fields. He later discovered plasma physicists were applying similar techniques to plasma waves, and that he had rediscovered some results of Rudolf Peierls explaining the diffusion of heat in solids by non-linear phonon interactions. This led him to review the field of plasma physics, rekindling an earlier interest in Quantum Field Theory.
“It was really an eye-opener to realize how specialized we are in our fields, and that we need to know much more about what was going on in other fields. Through this experience I became interested in particle physics and quantum field theory. So I entered quantum field theory through the back door, through working with real wave fields rather than with particles.”
Hasselmann has won a number of awards over his career. In January 1971 the Sverdrup Medal of the American Meteorological Society; in May 1997 he was awarded the Symons Memorial Medal of the Royal Meteorological Society; in April 2002 he was awarded the Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal of the European Geophysical Society.
Read more about this topic: Klaus Hasselmann
Famous quotes containing the words professional, background, climate and/or research:
“Many young girls are ... becoming trained nurses, whose gentle ministrations in the sick-room, skilled touch, patient watchfulness and unwearied vigils, are as great factors in the care of the sick, as are the professional physicians.”
—Lydia Hoyt Farmer (1842–1903)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“When we consider how much climate contributes to the happiness of our condition, by the fine sensation it excites, and the productions it is the parent of, we have reason to value highly the accident of birth in such a one as that of Virginia.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)