Invited by TEL Prof. MA Yaoming, Prof. Yongkang Xue of UCLA, USA, visited ITP on September 19., 2014, and introduced his recent understanding in studying land-atmosphere interactions.

Entitled “Issues and challenges in understanding land-atmosphere interaction”, his report emphasized the importance of land-atmosphere interaction in the climate system. According to him, bilateral fully coupled land surface model has been widely used in the climate change study. But a challenge remains to be addressed, so as to find a proper constraint in modeling regional vegetation mobility and climate variability on seasonal time scale by integrated biophysical and biochemical approaches.

ITP is one of the institutions in China joining Prof. Xue’s NSF project named “Surface-induced forcing and decadal variability and change of the East Asian climate, surface hydrology and agriculture”. Future collaboration between ITP and UCLA scientists in this field would focus on evaluating the model performance with ground observation and monitoring data on the Tibetan Plateau.