5 Years of Work with Academician Kondratyev

Kirill Yakovlevich Kondratyev was a geophysicist, a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and one of the founders of the study of the Earth's atmosphere and climate from space. He fought in the Great Patriotic War with the 1st Guards Airborne Division and was badly wounded. In 1946 he graduated with honours in geophysics from Leningrad State University, where he rose from assistant to rector (1964–1970). He headed a department of the Voeikov Main Geophysical Observatory, worked from 1982 at the Institute of Limnology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and in 1992–2006 was Adviser to the Russian Academy of Sciences at its Research Centre for Ecological Safety.

He was one of the founders of the Nansen International Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre. He wrote more than 1,500 scientific papers and 102 monographs and received the USSR State Prize, awards of the World Meteorological Organization and the International Astronautical Federation, and the Symons Gold Medal of the Royal Meteorological Society. He consistently opposed Russia's signing of the Kyoto Protocol and regarded global warming as scientifically unproven.

The essay “Celestial Spheres. Cosmonaut V. P. Savinykh in memory of Academician Kondratyev” appeared in the newspaper “Sovetskaya Rossiya” on 5 October 2006 (interview by A. D. Orlov). The pilot-cosmonaut and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences V. P. Savinykh describes Kondratyev's role in space research of the atmosphere and the Earth and the task the Academician set for science: to gather all data on the planet into one multi-layer digital map and to add a modelling and forecasting system to it. Savinykh calls the monograph “Prospects for the Development of Civilization: A Multidimensional Analysis” the scientific and human testament of Kirill Yakovlevich.