Hydroclimate Extremes Lab
@PolyU

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• May 2025: Our research highlights the significant role of land-atmosphere coupling in linking rapid soil dryness to hot extremes and underscores the increased risk of cascading dry and hot hazards in a warming climate. This work was published in Earth's Future.

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• April 2025: We propose a new definition of lake drought and provide a global assessment of over 160,000 lakes (≥1 km²) from 1985 to 2018 using satellite observations and climate datasets. This work was published in Communications Earth & Environment and was selected to be highlighted as a "Featured" article.  

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• April 2025: Our work has been recognized as a top-viewed article in Geophysical Research Letters.

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• January 2025: Our research comprehensively investigates the ecosystem response to the speed of flash drought onset across various plant functional types and climatic regions, advancing our understanding of ecosystem dynamics in response to drought. This work was published in Communications Earth & Environment.

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• November 2024: Our research reveals a significant disparity in the occurrence of compound drought-heatwaves between low-income and high-income regions. These detected spatial differences could jeopardize the achievement of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to reduce poverty and inequality within and between nations and take urgent action to combat the impacts of climate change. This work was published in Communications Earth & Environment and featured in the “new science” section of Carbon Brief’s newsletter and the University of Oxford.  ​

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• October 2024: We developed an ensemble machine learning approach within a Bayesian hierarchical modeling framework to perform a comprehensive spatiotemporal analysis of compound flood risk in Hong Kong from 1979 to 2022. This work was published in   Journal of Hydrology.

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• September 2024: Dr Wang was awarded funding through the Hong Kong Scholars Program 2024. A postdoctoral fellow from the Mainland, Dr Jia Wei, known as the "Hong Kong Scholar," will join Dr Wang's research team to work on the project titled "Strengthening Urban Resilience to Compound Weather and Climate Extremes."

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• August 2024: My PhD student, Mo Zhou, won the "Best Paper Award" at the PolyU Research Student Conference (PRSC 2024). The title of her paper is "Decreasing Decay Rate of Tropical Cyclones in Response to Ocean Warming." Congratulations!  

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• April 2024: Our current research on concurrent heatwaves and extreme sea levels has received significant attention from the global community, including news coverage by The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), Scientific American, Nature Asia, Phys.org, France 24, Scimex, CCTV, Xinhua Net, People's Daily, China News, Tencent News, and PolyU PAIR.

 

• February 2024: Our work reveals that approximately 88% of global coastlines experienced a simultaneous occurrence of heatwaves and extreme sea levels from 1979 to 2017. These compound extreme events are expected to occur with greater frequency in a warming climate, with tropical regions being particularly at risk. This work was published in Communications Earth & Environment.

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• December 2023: Dr Wang was awarded the “2023 Tianhe Star Award” for his outstanding accomplishments in extreme weather and climate research. The awardees were selected from among thousands of users of the Tianhe supercomputer, spanning the broad field of high-performance computation in science, engineering, and beyond.

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• December 2023: My PhD student, Yamin Qing, has been awarded the "Best Research Postgraduate Student of the Year". This year, three PhD students were selected in recognition of their outstanding research and academic performance. Congratulations!

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• December 2023: Our work identifies the hotspots of compound dry and wet extremes across global rice croplands and their impacts on rice yield, providing new insights into the sustainability of global rice production and food security in the face of compound events. This work was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

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• November 2023: Our work reveals accelerated soil drying in recent four decades over the world's wet regions, implying an increased risk of rapidly developing droughts and posing a serious challenge for the adaptability of ecosystems and agriculture to rapid drying. This work was published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.

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• October 2023: Our work reveals a higher exposure of poorer people to emerging weather whiplash in a warmer world. This work was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

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• September 2023: Our work reveals that climate change is fueling an alarming increase in the frequency of sudden shifts from severe droughts to downpours, which has received international and local media coverage, including Yahoo UK, Mirage News, Earth.com, The Daily Texan, PolyU PAIR, etc.

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• August 2023: Dr Wang was appointed as an Associate Editor for Water Resources Research which is the most prestigious journal in the field of hydrology and water resources, published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

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• August 2023: My first PhD student, Boen Zhang, received a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship appointment at the University of Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment, starting in September 2023. Congratulations!

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• July 2023: Our work explores the dynamic evolution and underlying mechanisms of drought and pluvial transitions and reveals that soil moisture−atmosphere feedbacks have triggered the shifts from drought to pluvial conditions since 1980. This work was published in Communications Earth & Environment.

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• July 2023: Our work reveals growing threats from swings between hot and wet extremes in a warmer world. This work was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

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• May 2023: Our flash drought paper was recognized as “ESI Highly Cited Paper” - in the top 1% of the academic field of Geosciences.

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• April 2023: Our work reveals the historical evolution and the future change of spatially compounding drought and pluvial events over Eastern China under a warming climate. This work was published in Earth's Future.

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• February 2023: My MSc student, Bowie Tong, won the 2022 Dissertation Award for Postgraduate Students, conferred by The Hong Kong Institute of Surveyors (HKIS). The title of his dissertation is "Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics of Sea Level for Evaluating Formation Levels of Reclaimed Land in Hong Kong". Congratulations!

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• December 2022: After the two-round intense competitions, my PhD student, Yamin Qing, achieved excellence in the highly competitive Young Scientist Award in Physical & Mathematical Science, conferred by the Hong Kong Institution of Science. Her achievement was highlighted in the PolyU Pulse Newsletter. Congratulations!

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• October 2022: We develop a vine copula-based ensemble projection of precipitation intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves for China at sub-daily to multi-day time scales. This work was published in Water Resources Research. A web-based data platform was also developed for China’s Urban Precipitation IDF Curves Considering Climate Change Impacts (http://chinaidf.com).

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• October 2022: Our work reveals that approximately three-fifths of global land area is projected to experience an accelerated transition between dry and wet extremes due to an increase in precipitation and evapotranspiration variabilities in a warming climate. This work was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

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• September 2022: My first PhD student, Boen Zhang, successfully defended his dissertation entitled "Probabilistic Projections of Hydrologic Extremes under A Warming Climate". Congratulations!

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• August 2022: Our flash drought work received widespread media coverage from more than 80 news outlets (source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28752-4/metrics). It was ranked in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric (source: https://nature.altmetric.com/details/124049117#score).

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• July 2022: Our compound hazard work was selected as Research Highlight in Nature.

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• June 2022: Our work reveals a recent increase in the occurrence of snow droughts followed by extreme heatwaves in a warmer world, which was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

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• June 2022: Our flash drought work was featured in PolyU Pulse Newsletter and 2nd Issue of the PolyU PAIR Newsletter.

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• May 2022: Our paper titled "A vine copula-based polynomial chaos framework for improving multi-model hydroclimatic projections at a multi-decadal convection-permitting scale" was published in Water Resources Research. We develop a deep neural network-based polynomial chaos expansion that significantly improves the efficiency and reliability of predicting regional hydrologic responses to the changing climate.

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• May 2022: Our paper titled "Development of a joint probabilistic rainfall-runoff model for high-to-extreme flow projections under changing climatic conditions" was published in Water Resources Research. Our proposed model outperforms three well-known machine learning models (i.e., random forest, artificial neural networks, and long short-term memory) in the challenging high-to-extreme flow predictions.

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• April 2022: Our paper titled "Accelerating flash droughts induced by the joint influence of soil moisture depletion and atmospheric aridity" was published in Nature Communications. We explore the rapid onset speed of flash droughts and underlying mechanisms. The press release was published by PolyU and UT Austin. The paper was featured on ScienceDaily, Phys.org, EurekAlert, Grist, etc.

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• March 2022: Our research work on the topic of compound heatwave and heavy rainfall events was featured by PolyU RILS and in the Inaugural Issue of the PolyU PAIR Newsletter.

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• February 2022: The Editorial for our special issue of "Hydroclimatic Extremes and Impacts in a Changing Environment: Observations, Mechanisms, and Projections" was published in Journal of Hydrology. This special issue is a timely collection of 50 high-quality articles that cover a variety of topics in the field of hydroclimatic extremes. The special issue received about 150 submissions and the acceptance rate was about 32%. It is one of the most popular special issues published in Journal of Hydrology.

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• February 2022: Our paper titled "A stepwise clustered hydrological model for addressing the temporal autocorrelation of daily streamflows in irrigated watersheds" was published in Water Resources Research.

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• December 2021: Dr Wang was invited to join the Editorial Board of Environmental Research Communications, representing areas of research relevant to hydrology and climate change studies.

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• September 2021: Our work reveals a higher probability of occurrence of hotter and shorter heat waves followed by heavy rainfall in China, which was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

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• March 2021: Our paper titled "Multi-decadal convection-permitting climate projections for China’s Greater Bay Area and surroundings" was published in Climate Dynamics. A web-based China's Greater Bay Area Climate Data Portal, http://www.gbacdp.cn/, was also developed to disseminate future projected climate change information derived from convection-permitting climate simulations and to support climate change impact and adaptation research.

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• March 2021: Our paper titled "Adapting to changing labor productivity as a result of intensified heat stress in a changing climate" was published in GeoHealth.

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• December 2020: Our paper about improving the characterization of extreme storm surges induced tropical cyclones was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

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• December 2020: Our paper about probabilistic projections of multidimensional flood risks at a convection-permitting scale was published in Water Resources Research.

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• November 2020: Our paper titled "Projected changes in abrupt shifts between dry and wet extremes over China through an ensemble of regional climate model simulations" was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

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• September 2020: My student, Chue Cheuk Ying Cherry, won the HKIS Outstanding Dissertation Award 2020. The title of her dissertation is "Digital Geospatial Flood Inundation Mapping with the Aid of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles". Congratulations!

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• July 2020: Our paper about developing probabilistic projections of hydrological droughts through convection-permitting climate simulations and multi-model hydrological predictions was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

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• April 2020: Our paper about exploring abrupt alternations between wet and dry conditions on the basis of historical observations and convection-permitting climate model simulations was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

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• June 2019: Our paper about developing copula-based convection-permitting projections of future changes in multivariate drought characteristics was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

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• March 2019: Our paper about assessing climate change impacts on human-perceived temperature extremes was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

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• March 2019: Our paper about probabilistic hydroclimatic projections through high-resolution convection-permitting climate modeling was published in Climate Dynamics.

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• March 2018: Our paper about hydrologic ensemble predictions using data assimilation was published in Water Resources Research.

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• January 2018: Dr Wang was invited to serve as an Associate Editor for Journal of Hydrology.

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• December 2017: Our paper titled "A multi-level Taguchi-factorial two-stage stochastic programming approach for characterization of parameter uncertainties and their interactions: An application to water resources management" was recognized as the top 1% highly cited paper in Essential Science Indicators.

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• August 2017: Dr Wang received an Outstanding Reviewer Award for Journal of Hydrology.

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