• Dr. Wang and Dr. Meijian Yang were interviewed by Madeleine Baerg from the SeedWorld magazine on crop yield change projections in the Corn Belt. Here is the piece from Seed World Magazine: Post 2050: A  Corn Belt Without Corn
• The 5th National Climate Assessment was released today on November 14: https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/. Congratulations to the entire NCA5 team!  UConn is well represented on the NCA5 team, with both Dr. Wang (CEE) and Dr. Zhu (NRE) being co-authors for Chapter 6 Land Cover and Land-Use Changes!  
• Elaina Hancock put together this piece on UConn Today:  Two UConn Researchers Among NCA5 Authors

 

Dr. Wang is the proud recipient of the 2023 C.R. Klewin Inc. Excellence in Teaching Award! This award is given annually to a faculty selected (in May) by the graduating class of seniors in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Congratulations to Dr. Wang! Thanks and best wishes to the CEE Class of 2023! 

 

This month, UConn Today research spotlight reported on our lab’s paper about crop yield changes in the U.S. Corn Belt led by Dr. Meijian Yang. Read the news story here:

https://today.uconn.edu/2023/09/heat-stress-to-bring-big-changes-to-the-us-corn-belt/ 

Yara Medawar joined the lab as a first year PhD student and an NRT Fellow. Yara received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from Notre Dame University in Lebanon, and M.S. degree in Public Policy from UConn. Welcome, Yara!

Congratulations are due to Dr. Meijian Yang for the publication of two papers on the same day! “Water stress dominates the projected maize yield changes in Ethiopia” in Global and Planetary Changes (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2023.104216 ) and  “Heat stress to jeopardize crop production in the US Corn Belt based on downscaled CMIP5 projections” in Agricultural Systems ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2023.103746 )

Dr. Wang led the successful planning of the 37th Conference on Hydrology, which took place at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver  as part of the AMS 103rd Annual Meeting during January 8-12. The meeting was very well attended and was a great success!

Dr. Wang gave a talk on the role of vegetation in flash drought development, Dr. Jiang gave a virtual poster on his attribution study of the 2020-21 U.S. drought, and Koushan talked about his research on snow hydrology and winter flood analysis. It was Koushan’s first oral presentation at AMS and he did great!

Javad Teymoori joined the lab as a new PhD student! Javad earned his B.S. from University of Mohaghegh Ardabili and M.S. from University of Tehran in Iran. His PhD dissertation research will focus on land-atmosphere interactions in drought development. Welcome Javad!

Our lab had a strong show at the AGU Fall Meeting held in Chicago. Dr. Wang talked about our work on machine learning-based crop yield modeling, Yan talked about her research on how temperature and water stress influence ecosystem productivity, Yelin presented his study on the role of soil moisture and soil temperature as sources of subseasonal predictability, Koushan presented his latest analysis on SIF RCI and flash drought early warning based on multiple datasets, and Badhan presented her progress in climate downscaling using a deep learning approach! It was Yan’s first oral presentation at AGU and she did a great job!

Yelin Jiang successfully defended his PhD dissertation and is taking a postdoc job at Columbia University. Congratulations Dr. Jiang!

Congratulations to Qinqing and Meijian for the publication of a highly interdisciplinary paper in AIES! It is an exemplary  collaboration between AI experts and process-based modelers to predict crop yield in the U.S. Corn Belt: “Machine learning crop yield models based on meteorological features and comparison with a process-based model”, Artificial Intelligence for Earth Systems, 1(4), https://doi.org/10.1175/AIES-D-22-0002.1

Meanwhile, our PNAS paper continues to garner media attention. Here is a comprehensive piece from the New York Public Radio: https://gothamist.com/news/a-plants-glow-can-predict-some-droughts-weeks-in-advance-uconn

Dr. Xiaoming Sun’s paper on negative scaling of extreme precipitation has been published! Congratulations Xiaoming!

Sun & Wang, 2022: Causes for the negative scaling of extreme precipitation at high temperatures. Journal of Climate, doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-22-0142.1

The lab welcomed new PhD student Faisal Alvee. Faisal received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. His PhD research will focus on understanding and predicting extreme precipitation in a changing climate. Welcome Faisal!

Koushan’s paper on SIF-based flash drought early warning has been published in PNAS. Congratulations!  https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202767119 

Click here to read the UConn Today article on our lab’s new publication:

For Advance Drought Warning, Look to the Plants

Two new papers from our lab have been published recently:

Erfanian et al. on “Variability, trend, and extremes of the South American vegetation-climate system: Results from a coupled regional model” in JGR-Atmospheres
https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JD035691

Wang & Sun on “Monotonic increase of extreme precipitation intensity with temperature when controlled for saturation deficit” in Geophysical Research Letters

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2022GL097881

Congrats!