Zhiming Kuang, Associate of Climate Science.
Climate scientist aims to understand the convective forces driving El Niño and the South Asian monsoons. Harvard President Drew Faust has approved Zhiming Kuang for promotion to the role of full professor with tenure. A climate scientist who specializes in modeling tropical convection systems, Kuang holds a joint appointment in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS). His work investigates how tropical convection interacts with large-scale atmospheric flow, and how fluctuations in that system can bring about rainfall or drought. In 2010, he coauthored a study which challenged the conventional view that South Asian monsoons were caused by a massive release of heat from the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau. With colleagues in EPS, Kuang created a model of atmospheric circulation and demonstrated that the insulating barrier of the Himalayas is just as capable of producing a monsoon, without the influence of the Plateau. The implications of that research extend to land use in South Asia and the future of the region's water supply.
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