Klaus Hasselmann

[1] He is best known for developing the Hasselmann model[3][4] of climate variability, where a system with a long memory (the ocean) integrates stochastic forcing, thereby transforming a white-noise signal into a red-noise one, thus explaining (without special assumptions) the ubiquitous red-noise signals seen in the climate (see, for example, the development of swell waves).

[1] His father Erwin Hasselmann [de] was an economist, journalist, and publisher, who was politically active for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDPG) from the 1920s.

Due to his father's activity in the SDPG, the family emigrated to the United Kingdom in mid-1934 at the beginning of the Nazi era to escape the repressive regime and persecution of social democrats, and Klaus Hasselmann grew up in the U.K. from age 2.

In August 1949, at the age of nearly eighteen, he followed his parents to Hamburg in the then divided Germany to attend higher education.

The subject of his PhD thesis was a method for determining the reflection and refraction of shock fronts and of arbitrary waves of small wavelength at the interface of two media.

[1] Between January 1988 and November 1999 he was also Scientific Director at the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ, Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum), Hamburg.

[8][9][10] Hasselmann 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.

He applied the theory of optimal linear filters to this multivariate, space-time dependent complex problem in order to give a prescription of how to extract these fingerprints.

[2] On climate change Hasselmann has said that "the main obstacle is that the politicians and the public are not aware of the fact that problem is quite solvable.