In this Zeit Online article by Fritz Habekuß, on the occasion of this year's Nobel Prize awards, Research Scholar Gregor Lax of the Max Planck Research Program (GMPG) tells of Klaus Hasselmann's role in establishing climate research in Germany.

In the early 1970s Hasselmann, a physicist with a background in turbulence research, investigated the formation of sea waves. Building on his work, a sea wave model was developed at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M)—incidentally programmed by the mathematician (and Hasselmann's wife), Susanne Hasselmann.

During this time, Klaus Hasselmann also performed his pioneering work on the stochastic identification of anthropogenic fingerprints in climate data sets. As the article explains, climate models developed at MPI-M, and later the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), remain an integral part of the toolbox used in international climate research today.