WASHINGTON - John Kutzbach, a US climatologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on Tuesday received China's top science honor for foreigners, the International Science and Technological Cooperation Award.

"I am honored to receive this international science cooperation award. ... It's a great honor," Kutzbach, 80, told a special ceremony at the Chinese embassy in Washington.

Kutzbach was granted the 2016 award, along with four other foreign scientists and one international organization, for helping hasten the development of China's research in global climate changes.

But he did not attend the award ceremony held in January in Beijing because of health reasons.

On Tuesday, Kutzbach recalled that his 30-year cooperation with China started with a visit by two Chinese scientists to his university during a cold winter in the 1980s.

"You can't see the future very well. So I had no dream that our work together would lead to so much scientific accomplishment involving so many US and Chinese scientists and also deep friendships," he said.

Kutzbach said this cooperation is "not something that has a beginning and an end" and should continue under the administration of President Donald Trump. "We are doing this not for our generation, but for the future of our two countries," he said. "It's my hope the strong scientific cooperation between our two countries will strengthen and grow."

Kutzbach, born in 1937, is a longtime director of the Center for Climate Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2006.

As one of the forerunners of paleoclimate modelers, he has studied the responding and feeding back mechanisms in the simulation of changing Earth process through groundbreaking connections of climatology, geology and ecology sciences with numerical method of physics and bio-geochemistry.

The International Science and Technological Cooperation Award was launched in 1994. Since then, 106 foreign scientists and three organizations have been won the honor.