Dr. Hans von Storch

Director of Institute for Coastal Research
of the GKSS Research Centre (Beginning with 1. November 2010: Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht - Zentrum für Material- und Küstenforschung) in Geesthacht

Professor at the Meteorological Institute
of the University of Hamburg, Germany

Doctor honoris causa
of Göteborgs Universitet.

• News
• Conferences, Public Talks, Tagungen, Öffentliche Vorträge
• On Hans von Storch
• Intellectual achievements
• The story of the Climate Research affair in 2003, and its reemergence in 2009
• Adresses
• private; vacation address
• Important links
• 
  Weblog Klimazwiebel: Following the paradigm of the "Honest Broker", dealing with climate research and its interaction with politics.

Books of Hans von Storch

• 18. August 2010 - An analysis of the assessment of climate model performance by "climate scientists" has been made, based on surveys among climate scientists from all over the world (CLISCI) and in the Baltic Sea basin (BALTEX). Results concerning atmospheric hydrodynamics and clouds have now been published on-line at Climate Science & Policy .


• The deadline for submitting abstracts to the 11th International Coastal Symposium (ICS2011; 9-14.05.2011) in Szczecin, Poland is coming closer - 1. September is the last day. After this date the “Call for Abstracts” will be closed and all submitted texts will be automatically generated as PDF files and printed. Since then there will be no possibility to add, edit or delete abstracts.


• 17 August 2010 - Details of sessions of Storm Surge Congress, 13-17 September in Hamburg available on flyer.


• 13. August 2010 - beginning 1 November 2010, the GKSS Research Center will have a new name, namely "Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht - Zentrum für Material- und Küstenforschung GmbH". URL will be http://www.hzg.org/.


• 6. August 2010 - Der Hamburger Klimabericht ist jetzt als Druckvorlage an den Springer Verlag gegangen. Das Erscheinen ist für November geplant. Absicht der Aktion ist, das wissenschaftlich legitimierte Wissen über Klima, Klimawandel und Klimawirkung für die Metropolregion Hamburg zusammenzutragen. Organisiert wurde das Unterfangen als eine Art regionales mini-IPCC nach dem Vorbild des BACC Reports für den Ostseeraum vom Exzellenzentrum CLISAP und vom Norddeutschen Klimabüro, unter der Leitung von Hans von Storch und Martin Claussen.

After one month, news are moved to this archive.

Important links:

Norddeutsches Klimabüro

REKLIM Verbund der HGF

Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction (CliSAP).

Hans von Storch is a director of the Institute for Coastal Research of the GKSS Research Centre and professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg. His research interests are coastal climate and impact (wind, storm surges and waves) in recent times and in possible futures, and methodical issues of statistical climatology (such as detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change, or utility of proxy data). He is also engaged in transdisciplinary research with social and cultural scientists since many years.

Hans von Storch has published 16 books, and numerous articles. He is member of the advisory/review boards of Journal of Climate, Environmental Science and Policy and Meteorologische Zeitschrift, Annals of Geophysics, the Romanian Journal of Meteorology, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews/Climate Change and organizor of the GKSS School on Environmental Research (series published by Springer Verlag), and correspondant of the Atmospheric Sciences Section of AGU Newsletter. He is a member of the steering committees of the Exzellenzzentrum KlimaCampus in Hamburg, of International Meetings on Statistical Climatology and a vice-chair of the BALTEX-programme. He chairs the committee for the Eduard Brückner award, the BALTEX Working Group on BACC II, which will assess in 2008-20011 climate and climate change in the Baltic Sea region, and the committee "Klimabericht für die Metropolregion Hamburg". After having served as a Lead Author for Working Group I of IPCC TAR, he has now been appointed as a Lead Author for Working Group II of IPCC AR5.

Hans studied mathematics, physics and Danish at the University of Hamburg, and received a diploma in mathematics in 1976. While a student he also worked as a programmer at the Department of Oceanography. He went on to receive his Ph.D. from the Meteorological Department of the University of Hamburg in 1979, and his "Habilitation" in 1985. From 1987 - 1995, he was Senior Scientist and leader of the "Statistical Analysis and Modelling" group at the Max Planck-Institut for Meteorology (Hasselmann division). In 1996, Hans von Storch became director of what became later the Institute for Coastal Research at the GKSS Research Centre and professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg. Within the Institute for Coastal Research, he heads the division "Systems Analysis and Modelling". In October 2008, he was awarded a doctor h.c. by Göteborgs Universitet.

He is married to Dr. Jin-Song von Storch.

During his academic life, which began in about 1976, Hans von Storch made a number of intellectual achievements. (Werner Krauss wrote a nice subjective piece about my role and my achievements.; see also Sven Titz' "Klimawissenschaft zwischen Skylla und Charybdis" in NZZ, 27. January 2010. An overview of my work is also given by the citation of the IMSC achievement award "to recognize his key contributions to statistical downscaling, reconstruction of temperature series, analyses of climatic variability, and detection and attribution of climate change".)

• Among these was the invention of the "downscaling"-terminology and the first examples of using the statistical variant of this approach for the construction of climate change scenarios. (Details)
• Also in the field of downscaling was the introduction of the spectral nudging technique for usage in mainly reconstructing regional climate extending decades of years but also for scenario construction. (Details) Hans von Storch was among the first, who demonstrated that numerical experiments with regional models need signal-to-noise analysis, just as global model experiments do. (Details)
• Hans von Storch demonstrated how to implement the rather abstract concept of Principal Oscillation Patterns of Klaus Hasselmann routinely for analysis and prediction purposes. (Details)
• In the early 2000s, the debate about historical variations of climate were widely suppressed by gatekeeping, with the claim that the "hockeystick" would already describe the past millennium with good accuracy. A simulation study using ECHO-G millennium simulations demonstrated that the methodology behind the "hockeystick" was flawed. The publication of this result lead to the end of the unfortunate blockage which had prevailed so far. (Details)
• Joint work with social scientists allowed Hans von Storch to embed the practice of climate science and its interaction with public, media and politics into concepts such as "post-normal science". This has significant practical implications, such as the insight that even if reduction of emissions may be morally superior but the exclusive focus on it would be misleading when the unavoidable need for early planning of adaptive measures is at the same time neglected. (Details) From these insights followed also the initiative to set-up formal assessments on the knowledge about regional climate change, such as BACC for the Baltic Sea region. (Details)
• Assessing changing storminess, and marine implications (surges, waves) in Europe. (Details)
• Personal accounts of experiencing the changing conditions, ideas and moods of clinate research, provided by interviews with important scientific personalities in the field. (Details)
• Initiating assessments of scientific knowledge about climate and climate change in specific regions, such as the Baltic Sea catchment (BACC), the metropolitan region of Hamburg and the North Sea. The first BACC assessment was concluded in 2008 with the publication of a extensive book, under the leadership of Hans von Storch, organized by the BALTEX secretariat (Hans-Jörg Isemer, Marcus Reckermann).