报告人： Dr. Yu Liang  The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego

报告题目：Multi-Scale Tropical Climate System: From ENSO and MJO to Tropical Cyclones

报告摘要：The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) are two major tropical climate variability with a period of 2-7 years and 20-100 days, respectively. They profoundly influence global weather and climate—affecting phenomena from hurricane formation to extreme rainfall and drought, and are major sources of subseasonal to seasonal climate predictability. During El Niño events, strong bursts of westerly wind anomalies often appear in the western-central equatorial Pacific, and these “westerly wind bursts (WWBs)” can kick-start and intensify the event. The precise causes of these bursts, however, have remained unclear.

In this talk, I will show how the MJO and tropical cyclones act in tandem to generate these bursts, and more importantly, how this process is modulated by evolving background sea surface temperatures. I will then demonstrate how these new insights shed light on the formation mechanisms of extreme El Niño events, including a “turbo charger” that rapidly recharges equatorial ocean heat content preceding these extremes. Finally, I will talk about why changes of the MJO may make tropical cyclones more predictable on the subseasonal timescale under future global warming.

报告人简介：Yu Liang is currently an Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. He received his PhD at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Yale University in 2022, and his B.S. at the School of Physics, Peking University in 2017. In 2021 and 2023, he was awarded the Elias Loomis Prize “for excellence in studies of physics of the Earth” and P.M. Orville Prize “in recognition of outstanding research and scholarship in the Earth Sciences”, respectively, by the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. His research aims to improve our understanding of ocean, atmospheric, and climate dynamics in the contexts of contemporary global warming. He has published 7 first-author papers in top journals like npj Climate and Atmospheric Science and Journal of Climate. 

报告时间：2025年04月24日10：30  

报告地点：2号楼701

主持人： 王春在 研究员