Climate Science Concepts Born in Hamburg

Since the foundation of the Max Planck Institute in 1975 with the now-Nobel laureate Klaus Hasselmann as founding director, the climate science in Hamburg has seen a remarkable boost. Various ideas were brought forward, implemented and tested. Many of them ignited interest in the global scientific community, thus adding significant momentum to the development of modern climate science.

The participants of the remarkable development since 1975 have come together to identify these concepts “born in Hamburg”. In an introductory chapter, the historical development, including other significant developments of climate science in the late 19th and early 20th century are addressed. 

The main part consists of chapters addressing the development of key innovative concepts. These are chosen to describe ideas which have been suggested by scientists while working in Hamburg and have been taken up by the international community in applications and advancements (such as the stochastic framing of dynamics and analysis, adding carbon cycles to climate models, multiple equilibria in climate models, anomaly coupling, downscaling, and constructed proxies). These ideas may not in all cases have been strictly new, or “firsts”, but they were the Hamburg publications which made the difference.

The book is mostly a book on scientific concepts and ideas, less so a general history of climate science in Hamburg.

Hans von Storch is director emeritus of the Institute of Coastal Research of the Helmholtz Zentrum Geesthacht (HZG), professor at the University of Hamburg and professor at the Ocean University of China (Qingdao). From 1987 - 1995, he was Senior Scientist at the Max Planck-Institute for Meteorology, where he worked with Klaus Hasselmann. His research interests are climate diagnostics and statistical climatology, regional climate change and its transdisciplinary context. He has published 27 books, among them “Statistical Analysis in Climate Research” with Francis Zwiers.

Martin Claussen is Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and retired Professor of Physical Meteorology at the Universität Hamburg. Claussen's scientific interests are climate system modelling with a focus on the global interaction between vegetation, land surface and climate. He has studied the non-linear dynamics of the Sahara and its greening in the past and possible changes in a warming climate in the future. He is also interested in the history of climate science.

Martin Heimann is Director Emeritus of the Max Planck Institute of Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany. He is also  retired Honorary Professor of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena and Research Director at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Over the last five decades Martin Heimann has worked on analysing and modelling the global carbon cycle and its interaction with the physical climate system. 

Robert Sausen is a retired head of department at the DLR-Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre and is an apl. Professor of meteorology at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München. He started his career as a climate modeler at the MPI for Meteorology. Since more than three decades he has studied the impact of transport, in particular aviation, on the composition of the atmosphere and on climate. He has also developed techniques for mitigating the climate impact of aviation by operational means.

Eduardo Zorita is a physicist by training and climate scientist specializing in paleoclimate research. With a strong focus on reconstructing past climate conditions, he has contributed to understanding past long-term climate variability and its drivers. His research employs climate models and proxy data, and statistical analysis to uncover patterns of change across the past millennia, providing insights into current and future climate trends. He has previously worked at the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, at the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris and currently is with the Helmholtz-Centre Hereon in Geesthacht, Germany.