The focus of my research group is the fundamental dynamics in atmospheric circulation and chemical transport. Through a combination of theory and numerical modeling, we develop toolboxes to understand the global circulation of the atmosphere, from tropical Hadley cell circulations to extratropical storm systems, from tropospheric extreme weather to stratospheric polar vortex breakdown events, and from transport of water vapor to stratosphere-troposphere exchange of ozone. These processes are instrumental to our understanding of weather extremes (e.g. winter blizzards or heat waves), hydrological extremes (e.g., drought or flooding), or extreme air pollution. Our research can be categorized in two interrelated themes.

• Global atmospheric circulation and regional weather extremes
• Transport of atmospheric moisture and chemical species

For example, transport and mixing near the tropopause (~10km above the ground) can be illustrated in the animantion of Ertel’s Potential Vorticity (left) and O3 mixing ratio (right):

Recent Publications

Ma, Weiming, Hailong Wang, Gang Chen, L Ruby Leung, Jian Lu, Philip J Rasch, Qiang Fu, Ben Kravitz, Yufei Zou, John J Cassano and Wieslaw Maslowski, 2024: The role of interdecadal climate oscillations in driving Arctic atmospheric river trends , Nature Communications, 15, 2135, doi:10.1038/s41467-024-45159-5.

Ma, Weiming, Gang Chen, Bin Guan, Christine A Shields, Baijun Tian and Emilio Yanez, 2023: Evaluating the Representations of Atmospheric Rivers and Their Associated Precipitation in Reanalyses With Satellite Observations , Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 128, doi:10.1029/2023JD038937.

Lin, Yun, Yoshihide Takano, Yu Gu, Yuan Wang, Shujun Zhou, Tianhao Zhang, Kuilin Zhu, Jingyu Wang, Bin Zhao, Gang Chen, Damao Zhang, Rong Fu and John Seinfeld, 2023: Characterization of the aerosol vertical distributions and their impacts on warm clouds based on multi-year ARM observations , Science of The Total Environment, 904, 166582, doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.166582.

Ding, Xiuyuan, Gang Chen and Weiming Ma, 2023: Stratosphere‐Troposphere Coupling of Extreme Stratospheric Wave Activity in CMIP6 Models , Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 128, doi:10.1029/2023JD038811.

Ding, Xiuyuan, Gang Chen, Pengfei Zhang, Daniela I. V. Domeisen and Clara Orbe, 2023: Extreme stratospheric wave activity as harbingers of cold events over North America , Communications Earth & Environment, 4, 187, doi:10.1038/s43247-023-00845-y.