Meijian Yang successfully defended his PhD dissertation, and took a postdoctoral position in Cornell University. Congratulations, Dr. Yang! We will miss you.

This month, Yelin’s paper titled “Modeled response of South American climate to three decades of deforestation” was published in Journal of Climate!  Congrats Yelin!

During January 10th -15th, the 101th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), originally to be held in New Orlean, took place virtually. Dr. Wang was Annual Meeting Program Co-Chair for the Conference of Hydrology under AMS. In the scientific program, Dr. Wang gave a presentation titled “Recent Decrease of Vegetation Productivity in South America due to a Warming-Induced Drying Trend”. In addition, she organized a very well-attended Town Hall “Her Career, Her Stories” that “brings women together to share experience, challenges, and success, to inspire and empower each other, and to foster the development of mentoring relationships”. This remarkable event featured panelists Drs. Ana Barros, Terri Hogue, Ruby Leung, Christa Peters-Lidard, and Ms. Britt Westergard. All of them were amazing role models, and shared so much experience and wisdom with a large crowd. Many thanks to the panelists, and congrats to Dr. Wang for the success in organizing this TH!

This year’s AGU Fall Meeting took place virtually, and successfully! For our field, it was a truly star-studded meeting featured with named lectures by Dr. Rafael Bras and Dr. Ruby Leung, new fellow talk by Dr. Rong Fu, and the Presidential Forum with Leland Melvin (an engineer, educator, former NASA astronaut and NFL wide receiver). Dr. Wang enjoyed the Melvin speech so much that she played the video recording the next day and made her entire family watch with her!  

Dr. Wang and PhD students Yelin Jiang and Koushan Mohammadi all presented their research. The pre-recorded presentations combined with live intro+Q&A session worked out perfectly. It was Yelin’s first AGU talk and it went very well. Congrats!

Our Journal of Hydrometeorology paper is published! Congratulations and many thanks to all coauthors!

https://journals.ametsoc.org/jhm/article/21/12/2739/353595/Projected-Changes-of-Precipitation-Characteristics

Wang GL, Kirchhoff C, Seth A, Abatzoglou J, Livneh B, Pierce DW, Fomenko L, Ding T, 2020: Projected changes of precipitation characteristics depend on downscaling method and the training data: LOCA vs. MACA using the U.S. Northeast as an example. Journal of Hydrometeorology, doi:10.1175/JHM-D-19-0275.1

Congratulations to Brandon Holland and Tengyu Ding for receiving their M.S. degrees in Environmental Engineering!

Congratulations to Meijian Yang for the publication of his paper on modeling crop yield and production in Ethiopia!

Congratulations to Weiguang Liu for the publication of this paper on regional climate-vegetation projection in Asia!

Yang MJ, Wang GL, Ahmed KF, et al.,  2020: The role of climate in the trend and variability of Ethiopia’s cereal crop yields. Science of the Total Environment, 723, 137893

Liu WG, Wang GL, Yu M, et al., 2020: Multi-model future projections of the regional vegetation-climate system over Asia: Comparison between two ensemble approaches, JGR-Atmospheres, https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JD031967 

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.