Climate researcher Prof. Dr. Markus Rex is one of three distinguished recipients of this year’s NOMIS Award for groundbreaking interdisciplinary research. The NOMIS Award is one of the most prestigious and generously funded international scientific awards. The scientist from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) received particular recognition for leading the MOSAiC (Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate) expedition between the autumns of 2019 and 2020. For a year, the research ship drifted through the Arctic, frozen in ice. The goal was to gain a better understanding of the complex interaction between the ocean, the ice, the atmosphere and the ecosystem. Through the MOSAiC expedition, hundreds of scientists representing institutions from across 20 countries made significant contributions to the global understanding of climate feedback mechanisms in the central Arctic.
This is only the third time that Germany has received a NOMIS Award, and it is a first for a Helmholtz Centre. Rex plans to use the prize money to fund an innovative, AI-based approach to researching cloud processes in the polar climate system. “The prize money allows us to very quickly press ahead with innovative research that takes a fresh approach to tackling the greatest uncertainty in climate modelling,” emphasises Rex, who expects the planned “Deepcloud” project to lead to a breakthrough in understanding one of the most important feedback processes in the changing climate system.
With Deepcloud, Rex will take on the challenge of quantifying how clouds respond to global warming. The project will utilise AI-powered deep learning methods to model cloud processes. Leveraging newly available observational data from AWI polar stations and a satellite mission, Rex and his team will investigate how Arctic clouds respond to global warming and how increases in small particles in the atmosphere influence cloud properties. For the NOMIS foundation, this also speaks to his deep curiosity and strong commitment to open science.
Markus Rex is head of Atmospheric Physics at the Alfred Wegener Institute and full professor at the University of Potsdam in Germany. He studied physics, meteorology and geophysics at the Technical University of Braunschweig and the University of Göttingen. He received his PhD in atmospheric physics from the Freie Universität Berlin and completed his habilitation at the University of Bremen. He has worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.
His two fellow 2025 NOMIS Award winners are: Sara Seager, professor of physics, planetary science and aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she holds the Class of 1941 Professor Chair, and Wolfgang Busch, the Hess Chair in Plant Science and professor and director at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
