Atmospheric Composition and Climate
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Recent Research Highlights
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.
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.
Climate Driver of Carbon Update by Forests
By leveraging the emerging high-resolution measurements of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) from contemporary satellites, our recent GCB paper shows that the dependence of SIF on climate variables is highly heterogeneous, with two regimes identified: water and energy limited. We find that the coupling between SIF and water supply increases with the mean dryness, while the current suite of vegetation models fail to capture it, casting doubt on the projections of future changes in carbon dynamics.
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.
Air Cleaning Suppressed Winter Extremes
Anthropogenic aerosol emissions decreased over North America and Europe but increased over Asia since the 1970s. Our recent paper on Nature Climate Change revealed that this aerosol forcing caused jet stream winds to shift poleward over the Atlantic, decreasing planetary wave activity and partially inhibiting extreme winter weather over northern Eurasia. It stresses the importance of anthropogenic aerosols and their spatiotemporal variability in assessing the drivers of extreme weather in historical and future climate.