my reserach
The water cycle and the energy and carbon cycles are inextricably linked. Climate and the coupled hydrologic cycle are altered when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rise, affecting the terrestrial water cycle through modifying rainfall pattern, evaporation rate, surface energy budget, and the availability of soil moisture required for vegetations’ carbon dioxide absorption. Increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere also affect stomatal regulation and biomass, affecting ecosystem photosynthesis and transpiration rates. The complexity of these surface-atmosphere processes, ranging from plant physiology to boundary layer dynamics, is further compounded by the high spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the land surface, and anthropogenic activities. The science community now generally agrees that the Earth’s climate and extreme weather events are undergoing changes in response to natural variability, and increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols.
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While extreme weather is a part of the natural cycle, the recent uptick in the ferocity and frequency of these extremes is evidence of an acceleration of climate impacts. Climate extremes have also been accompanied by an increase in the co-occurrence of multiple dependent hazards, known as climate compounds. Recent events like the Earth's hottest month on record (June 2021), record-setting wildfires in California, the megadrought on the Colorado River, record-breaking snowmelt in western North America are merely the latest illustrations. At the same time, energy production and supply will continue to drive anthropogenic climate change, exacerbating the risks of water shortages, drought, heatwaves, and floods. Under these circumstances, designing and planning for a resilient system for a sustainable food and energy supply would be increasingly biased by simply relying on the traditional assessments and historical data for identifying climate extremes and climate compounds. Additionally, the risk assessment for the extremes will be significantly underestimated or spatiotemporally mismanaged particularly in the manifestation of climate compounds.
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To create such a framework and address these questions, I started my research from fieldwork at a small scale to understand and measure surface fluxes and plant physiology responses (like stomatal regulations) to water availability. I expanded my research on water-related issues at larger scales using a suite of remotely sensed datasets and modeling tools (from crop models to land surface models). I analyze the model outputs using geostatistical and machine learning approaches to identify the causal relationships in land-atmospheric feedbacks. For more details about my research and projects, please check my cv and the projects listed here.
Understanding the nature of climate extremes, their spatiotemporal shifts, how the land-atmospheric processes operate across a range of spatial and temporal scales and advancing their predictability, and risk assessment require an interdisciplinary-based multi-layer framework that captures the complex causal chains of atmospheric, plant, and land energy processes. In this framework, we need to i) look for smart and innovative approaches to scale, fuse, and integrate satellites observations with assimilated data that bridge the gap between atmospheric, agriculture, and hydrology community and better represent climate features at different scales; ii) use artificial intelligence and robust statistical approaches to detect the extreme events, shift in patterns, and changepoints and use this information to enhance our ability to rapidly identify and attribute extreme events in near real-time iii) convert the information to user-friendly outputs and refine our ability to communicate this information to a broad range of decision-makers and stakeholders.
