Abstract:

Land surface is coupled with the atmosphere, and thereby influences weather and climate, through modulating land-atmosphere exchanges of water, energy, and momentum and large-scale atmospheric circulation. While climate change has been widely demonstrated to strongly alter land surface characteristics, such as soil moisture, vegetation, and snow, the feedback of land surface to the atmosphere remain underexplored. In this presentation, I would like to share my recent studies investigating how soil moisture-atmosphere feedbacks impact climate extremes, surface water availability, and terrestrial ecosystem carbon uptake using in situ observations, reanalysis products, and multi-model land-atmosphere coupling experiments.

Presenter information (including research interests):

Sha Zhou received her Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Hydraulic Engineering at Tsinghua University in 2013 and obtained a Doctoral degree from the same department in 2018. Her doctoral study focused on the land-atmosphere exchanges of water, carbon, and energy, and their responses to climate change and human activities. In early 2018, she was awarded a Lamont-Doherty Postdoc Fellowship and an Earth Institute Postdoc Fellowship at Columbia University. During her postdoc, she works on how land-atmosphere feedbacks impact extreme climate and weather and the global water and carbon cycles under climate change. She has published 15 first-author papers in Science Advances, PNAS, Nature Climate Change (in press), etc.

Institution:

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University