Public Research Seminar by Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS) Thrust, HKUST (GZ) - Tiny Particles, Big Impacts: Understanding Aerosol Effects Across Weather and Climate Scales
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Atmospheric aerosols play a critical role in the Earth system by impacting the energy budget and cloud formation, consequently influencing climate change and weather extremes. However, aerosols remain the largest uncertainty in understanding and simulating Earth’s weather and climate systems. One of the challenges arises from the complex aerosol effects across various temporal and spatial scales. To address aerosol uncertainty, Dr. Yanda Zhang systematically investigated aerosol effects on both weather and climate across regional to global scales through various physical processes: (1) Based on multi-observations and high-resolution regional simulations, the East Asian dust aerosols were identified to substantially enhance regional extreme precipitation and convection through cloud microphysical processes and convective invigoration. (2) Leveraging global climate models, the aerosol effects are revealed to significantly drive historical global precipitation changes and dominate associated model biases by influencing atmospheric energy balance and circulation changes. (3) He developed a new energetic analysis framework which directly links hydrological changes to radiative forcings. This theoretical approach explains why “dry regions get drier” in last decades and elucidates the global climate effects of regional aerosol changes by untangling their local and remote effects. The series of research provides critical multi-scale insights into the climate effects of aerosols, offering a foundation for improving predictions of climate change and weather extremes, and informing environmental policy and sustainable development.
Dr. Yanda Zhang is a climate scientist specializing in aerosol effects on climate change, extreme events and associated climate and weather modeling. He is currently a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University, where he leads studies on multi-scale climate responses to regional aerosol changes, including global hydroclimate changes, Arctic amplification and extreme precipitation and heatwaves.
Dr. Zhang completed his Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Albany, focusing on the regional-scale effects of aerosols on convective clouds and extreme precipitation, as well as improving aerosol-cloud-convection interactions in regional climate models. He then conducted postdoctoral research at Princeton University and NOAA-Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory from 2021 to 2023, where he investigated the effects of anthropogenic aerosols on global precipitation changes and model biases from energetic and dynamic perspectives.
His research integrates numerical modeling, observational analysis, and theoretical frameworks to understand how aerosol forcing influences weather and climate systems across meso-to-global scales. His work aims to advance understanding of the interactions between human activities and Earth’s climate, and consequently providing insights for climate mitigation, disaster prevention, environmental policy, and sustainable development in a changing climate.
Phoenix Wenfeng LI <phoenixwfl@hkust-gz.edu.cn>