Zoom imageProfessor Peter Lemke in the Antarctic during one of his seven polar expeditions on the research ice-breaker Polarstern.
The Bayer Science & Education Foundation presented this year’s Bayer Climate Award to the polar researcher Professor Peter Lemke of Bremerhaven, Germany, for his outstanding contributions to climate research. His work centers on sea ice and its role as a barometer for climate change.
For more than 30 years, Lemke has been observing climate-relevant processes in the atmosphere, in sea ice and in the oceans. He focuses particularly on the interactions between them, as the formation or melting of ice is closely linked to air and water temperatures. Long-term trends in the atmosphere and the oceans are therefore reflected in sea ice, although it is difficult to distinguish between action and reaction.
Lemke was honored with the Bayer Climate Award for his fundamental and pioneering contributions to establishing the relationship between the oceans and the climate. Bayer CEO Werner Wenning presented Lemke with the award at the international climate conference “Continents under Climate Change” organized by the Humboldt University in Berlin. Lemke is the second recipient of the award, launched in 2008 to honor outstanding achievements in fundamental climate research.
“Professor Lemke’s research into sea ice has led to the development of key principles for the climate models used today by the scientific community to analyze climate change. The results also create a basis for decisions on climate policy,” said Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Plischke, member of the Bayer AG Board of Management and a member of the Board of Directors and Board of Trustees of the Bayer Science & Education Foundation, explaining the scientific committee’s decision.
“I am grateful for this recognition in the form of the Bayer Climate Award for the contributions my colleagues and I have made to climate science,” said Lemke. The prize-winner is currently Head of the Department of Climate Sciences at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven and Professor for Physics of Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Bremen.