Klaus Hasselmann, founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, is to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 together with Syukuro Manabe (USA) and Giorgio Parisi (Italy).

Hasselmann and Manabe are honored for their fundamental contributions to climate research, and Giorgio Parisi for his research on disordered materials and random processes. Klaus Hasselmann developed a model that linked together weather and climate, demonstrating how short-term phenomena such as precipitation are related to long-term developments such as ocean currents. This helped to explain why climate models can deliver reliable predictions despite short-term weather fluctuations. His methods have been used to prove that the increased temperature in the atmosphere is due to human emissions of carbon dioxide.