Our  team and recent lab alumni (Guiling, Meijian, Yelin, Weiguang, Miao, and Koushan) had a great time at the AGU meeting (San Francisco, December 2019) and the AMS meeting (Boston, January 2020)! We gave six talks/posters at AGU and four at AMS. Thanks and congratulations to everyone!

Dr. Wang had a field trip to Puerto Rico, and visited the Luquillo forest dynamics site at the Verde Field Station, the El Yunque National Forest, and the TRACE forest warming experiment site at the Sabana Field Station. It is amazing to see how the forest has responded to hurricane-induced tree mortality and crown damages (Irma and Maria in 2017)!

Dr. Wang gave a presentation at the Sustainable CT workshop for municipal leaders and staff in CT.

The lab welcomed Koushan Mohammadi,  a new PhD student interested in hydroclimatology and hydrological extremes. Koushan received his B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from Isfahan University Technology  and M.S. degree in Water Resources from University of  Tehran in Iran.

Visiting Ph.D. student Weiguang Liu completed his one year study abroad in our lab and returned to his home institution Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology. What a productive year it has been! We wish him best for his future endeavors and look forward to collaborating with him in the future.

Dr. Wang presented latest results on projected precipitation changes for Connecticut at the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation (CIRCA)’s Resilient Connecticut Webinar.

 

Dr. Wang gave a keynote at the “Food and Our Changing Climate: A Conference Integrating Science and Law” organized by Dr. Joseph MacDougald from UConn School of Law, Center for Energy and Environmental Law.  Senator Blumenthal stopped by and talked about environmental sustainability and climate change.

Dr. Wang attended the AMS annual meeting and the Inez Fung symposium in Phoenix, and presented our research on the impact of plant hydraulic redistribution on ecosystem carbon and nitrogen cycling, as well as our work on simulating the South American droughts using a regional climate model. Lab alumni Yeonjoo Kim (PhD, 2007; currently Associate Professor in Yonsei University) and Amir Erfanian (PhD, 2018, currently postdoc at UCLA) also attended the symposiums, and we had a mini lab reunion!

The Inez Fung symposium was a great success, thanks to the hard work by Dr. Rong Fu and many others organizing this symposium! It was great to hear all the stories about Inez shared by scientists from various career stages including several from her cohort of distinguished MIT alumni (e.g., Kalnay, Shukla). Purely inspiring!

Lab members Xiaoming Sun, Meijian Yang and Weiguang Liu attended the AGU fall meeting held in Washington D.C.. Xiaoming presented our research on the negative scaling of extreme precipitation at high temperatures; Meijian presented our research on developing a seasonal prediction system for crop yield. It was Weiguang’s first time to AGU meeting, and he also attended the LS4P multi-model intercomparison workshop held right before the AGU meeting. Very productive trips for all of them!

The Lab welcomed Weiguang Liu, a PhD student visiting from Dr. Miao Yu’s group at the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST). Weiguang received his B.S. degree in Atmospheric Science  from NUIST. His PhD research focuses on climate-ecosystem interactions and climate change. Welcome, Weiguang!

Dr. Wang gave a keynote “Drought in a Warming Climate: Causes for Change” in the IOGP/JCOMM/WCRP Workshop “Our Future Climate – Understanding the spread of physical risk for the oil and gas industry”, London, UK.

Yelin Jiang joined the Lab as a new PhD student in Environmental Engineering. Yelin received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Ecology from the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology. His PhD dissertation research will be on the general topic of land-atmosphere interaction and drought. Welcome, Yelin!

Congratulations to Congsheng Fu! His papers on hydraulic redistribution and its impact on the terrestrial biogeochemical cycles have been published in Global Change Biology (with Zoe Cardon, Marine Biological Labs) and Geophysical Research Letters!

Dr. Wang attended the “Robert Dickinson Symposium on Earth System Modeling: Past, Present and Future” held at the University of Texas-Austin to honor Bob, and talked about “Terrestrial Ecosystem-Climate Interactions in Earth System Modeling: A Regional Perspective”. The symposium was a great success, thanks to the hard work of the organizing committee led by Dr. Zong-Liang Yang! On her way back from Austin, Dr. Wang stopped by Washington DC for the PIRE project annual meeting and also visited Dr. Eugenia Kalnay and gave a talk on terrestrial ecosystem-climate interaction at the University of Maryland. A very productive trip!

Our lab welcomes M.S. student Tengyu Ding. Tengyu received his B.S. degree in Hydrology and Water Resources from the Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in China. His research focuses on modeling the terrestrial hydrological cycle. Welcome, Tengyu!