Dan Yakir was born in Netanya, Israel, to Dov Jancowarner, a tour guide, and Liora (née Bloch), a nurse who became a store owner.

[2] Yakir returned to Israel in 1991 and joined the Weizmann Institute as a Senior Scientist, where he established the Stable Isotopes Lab.

[3] Yakir is the chairman of the Climate Change Committee of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities,[4] and a board member at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies.

[2] The linking of Carbon-13 and Oxygen-18 led to the discovery of a method to estimate the internal resistance to CO2 diffusion into leaves, a key uncertainty in modeling photosynthetic CO2 fluxes from the atmosphere.

[9] Together with his colleague Dr. Rotenberg of the Weizmann Institute) they discovered the “convector effect,” by which Semi-arid forests sustain an extensive solar radiation load but maintain a low surface-to-air temperature difference by lowering the aerodynamic resistance to heat transfer and generating massive heat fluxes to the atmosphere.

[10] Using global-scale models, they showed that on a large scale, this mechanism provides a potential regional-scale climate modification tool.