Lennart Ramme receives Wladimir Köppen Award

Climate researcher Lennart Ramme from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) has been awarded the prestigious Wladimir Köppen Prize from the Cluster of Excellence "Climate, Climatic Change, and Society" (CLICCS) of the University of Hamburg for his doctoral thesis, which he completed in 2023. The award comes with a cash component of 5000 euros, which the prizewinner can use for scientific purposes. With this award, the CLICCS steering committee recognizes Ramme's work on Earth’s rapid transition from an almost complete glaciation ("Snowball Earth") to a hot super greenhouse around 635 million years ago. Under the scientific guidance of MPI-M Director Jochem Marotzke and MPI-M group leader Tatiana Ilyina and as part of the International Max Planck Research School on Earth System Modeling (IMPRS-ESM), Ramme investigated the role of the ocean after this massive climatic change. Using the climate model ICON, he found that the ocean exchanged carbon with the neighboring reservoirs much faster and that the super greenhouse was less hot than previously assumed.

Since completing his doctorate, Lennart Ramme has continued to work in MPI-M’s Climate Variability department, currently in the "WorldTrans - Transparent Assessments for Real People" project as part of the European Union's Horizon Europe program. In this project, he is investigating future carbon uptake by the ocean whilst considering scenarios in which carbon dioxide is actively removed from the atmosphere (“negative emissions”).