Martin Claussen

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Martin Claussen (2004)

Martin Claussen (born November 6, 1955 in Fockbek , Rendsburg district ) is a German meteorologist and climate researcher , professor of general meteorology at the University of Hamburg and director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.

Live and act

Claussen grew up in Flensburg , where he passed the humanistic Abitur at the old grammar school. He studied meteorology at the University of Hamburg, wrote his diploma thesis on radiation transport in three-dimensional cloud fields in 1981 and then did his doctorate as a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology at the University of Hamburg. His doctoral thesis dealt with the subject of turbulence spectra in the atmosphere close to the ground . During his doctorate, Claussen spent a year as a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA. After 1984 he worked as a postdoc and research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and at the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht and completed his habilitation in 1991 at the University of Hamburg with a thesis on the air flow near the ground over inhomogeneous surfaces.

In 1996, Claussen was appointed Professor of Theoretical Climatology at the Free University of Berlin and Head of the Climate System Department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). In 2002 he received a professorship for integrated climate system analysis at the University of Potsdam and became deputy director of PIK. In 2005 Claussen was awarded the Milutin Milankovic Medal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). In the same year he was appointed professor for general meteorology at the University of Hamburg and a scientific member and director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. In 2016 he received the Georgi Prize of the GeoUnion Alfred-Wegener Foundation.

Claußen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina ( Matriculation No. 6857 ), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , the German Academy of Engineering Sciences , the Academy of Sciences in Hamburg , the Academia Europaea , London, and a corresponding member of the Sciences and Sciences of literature, Mainz . Among other things, he was chairman of the German Meteorological Society , Senator of the German Research Foundation and member of the Scientific Committee of the IGBP (International Geosphere-Biosphere Program). From 2007 to 2014 Claußen was the spokesman for the Cluster of Excellence " Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction " (ESC 177).

Research priorities

The main research areas of Claussen's work are: climate system dynamics, simulation of the climate system and the paleoclimate . Claussen is fascinated by the interaction between the earth's atmosphere and its land surface, especially the vegetation. He researches the role this interaction plays in the development of the global and regional climate and how humans influence this interaction.

Claußen was one of the first to interactively couple a model of the vegetation zones with a climate model. He was able to show that the vegetation - climate system can assume different states of equilibrium with the same climate drive. This discovery led to the realization that an ecosystem can experience abrupt upheavals not only through purely biological processes, but also through interaction with the climate, as soon as external conditions, such as the gradual, long-period variations of solar radiation and the seasons or the rise in greenhouse gases, change.

One focus of his research is the development of the Sahara . Among other things, he investigates the question of why the Sahara was significantly greener a few thousand years ago than it is today and why the vegetation has retreated rather quickly in some areas and more gradually in other areas and how it could change over the next few centuries.

Publications (selection)

Technical articles

  • M. Claussen, V. Gayler: The greening of Sahara during the mid-Holocene: results of an interactive atmosphere - biome model. In: Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters. Volume 6, No. 5, 1997, pp. 369-377.
  • M. Claussen: On multiple solutions of the atmosphere-vegetation system in present-day climate. In: Global Change Biology. Volume 4, 1998, pp. 549-559.
  • V. Brovkin, M. Claussen, V. Petoukhov, A. Ganopolski: On the stability of the atmosphere-vegetation system in the Sahara / Sahel region. In: Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres. Volume 103, 1998, pp. 31613-31624.
  • M. Claussen, C. Kubatzki, V. Brovkin, A. Ganopolski, P. Hoelzmann, HJ Pachur: Simulation of an abrupt change in Saharan vegetation at the end of the mid-Holocene. In: Geophys. Res. Letters. Volume 24, No. 14, 1999, pp. 2037-2040.
  • M. Claussen, V. Brovkin, A. Ganopolski: Biogeophysical versus biogeochemical feedbacks of large-scale land cover change. In: Geophysical Research Letters. Volume 28, 2001, pp. 1011-1014.
  • M. Claussen: Late Quaternary vegetation - climate feedbacks. In: Clim. Past. Volume 5, No. 1, 2009, pp. 203-216.
  • M. Claussen, S. Bathiany, V. Brokvin, T. Kleinen: Simulated climate-vegetation interaction in semi-arid regions affected by plant diversity. In: Nature Geoscience. Volume 6, No. 11, 2013, pp. 954-958.
  • S. Bathiany, M. Claussen, V. Brovkin: CO2 - induced Sahel greening in CMIP5 Earth System Models. In: Journal of Climate. Volume 27, 2014, pp. 7163-7184.
  • S. Egerer, M. Claussen, C. Reick, T. Stanelle: Could gradual changes in Holocene Saharan landscape have caused the observed abrupt shift in North Atlantic dust deposition. In: Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Volume 473, 2017, pp. 104-112.
  • M. Claussen, A. Dallmeyer, J. Bader: Theory and modeling of the African humid period and the green Sahara. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. 2017, doi: 10.1093 / acrefore / 9780190228620.013.532

Popular science articles

  • M. Claussen: Climate changes: Possible causes in the past and future. In: UWSF - environmental science and pollutant research. Volume 15, 2003, pp. 21-30
  • M. Claussen: The great flyweight: Vegetation and its interactions with the global climate. In: J. Marotzke and M. Stratmann (ed.): The future of the climate. 2015, pp. 137–152.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Professor Martin Claussen. www.adwmainz.de, Academy of Sciences and Literature (Mainz), as of November 4, 2017
  2. ↑ Curriculum Vitae Prof. Dr. Martin Claußen , leopoldina.org, as of November 4, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Claussen, Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German meteorologist and climate researcher
DATE OF BIRTH November 6, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Fockbek , Rendsburg district