Atmospheric Composition and Climate
Welcome to the Wang Research Group at Stanford!
Recent Research Highlights
Climate Impacts of Regional Clean-air Strategies
Our recent Nature Communications paper reveals that, for an unexpectedly long time through ~2070, China’s air pollutant reductions can cause a large global surface temperature increase that almost fully offsets the cooling from concurrent CO2 emission reduction. A comprehensive and fully coupled Earth system model and recently updated future anthropogenic emission scenarios are employed to evaluate the climate impacts of China’s carbon neutrality and pollution mitigation strategies over a realistic and policy-relevant timescale.
Leading Role of Saharan Dust on Hurricane Rainfall
In our recent Science Advances paper (featured on the journal cover), we develop interpretable ML models to predict tropical cyclone rainfall (TCR) at the individual storm level. The SHAP values help identify non-linear and physically meaningful relationships between Saharan dust loading and TCR over the Atlantic basin from long-term observations. The models also capture meaningful correlations between TCR and meteorological factors such as sea surface temperature. Media coverage by Stanford Report and NSF.
Review on Air Pollutants and Climate Forcers
Our recent paper on Reviews of Geophysics synthesizes the latest progress in understanding changes in short-lived atmospheric compositions, that is, aerosols, ozone, methane, and nitrogen oxides (NOx), in response to COVID-19 induced emission reductions and the associated climate impacts on regional and global scales. It reviews the detection and attribution methods adopted by COVID research and discusses the science implications for future research and policy guidances on emission controls.
New Particle Formation During Heat waves
Wang Lab recently contributed to a Science paper (featured by the journal cover) showing unexpected new particle formation events during heat waves. Measurements and quantum chemical calculations reveal a kinetic pathway for supramolecular nanoparticle production by organic acids, an important consideration for assessing the potential impacts of new particle formation on public health and climate in a warming world in which heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense..
Direct Observational Constraints on Black Carbon Forcing
Black carbon (BC) is the largest warming agent amoung all aerosol species. Our recent paper on One Earth based on our single-particle-level observations reveal multi-level microphysical complexities in BC-containing particles, and suggest likely overestimated BC absorption in current aerosol-climate models. Our another recent paper on JAMES develops an improved aerosol optical model in a global climate model to better account for those observations.
AI/ML Boost Pollution and EJ Assessment
Air pollution in metropolitan areas varies with city-level, urban-rural, and neighborhood-level disparities. Our recent EST paper (featured on the journal cover) introduces a data-driven approach that leverages the real-world dynamic traffic profiles to continuously estimate community-level year-long air pollutants. The ML model shows promising ability to capture the traffic-induced exposure disparities and significantly improve residents’ exposure to PM2.5, especially for disadvantaged communities.