CW3E Welcomes Yuan Yang

September 6, 2022

Yuan Yang joined CW3E as a postdoctoral research scholar in August 2022. She received her B.E. in Hydrology and Water Resources in 2015 from Wuhan University, Hubei, China, and her Ph.D. degree in Hydraulic Engineering in 2020 from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. In 2018, she studied at Princeton University as a visiting student, under the supervision of Prof. Eric. F. Wood and Dr. Ming Pan.

Yuan’s research focuses on high-resolution land surface hydrologic modeling at regional to global scales with the utilization of remote sensing. She proposed a grid-level distributed parameter calibration approach for large-scale hydrologic modeling. She made considerable efforts to develop a 3-hourly river discharge record globally for 2.94 million river reaches during the 40-yr period of 1980–2019. Based on this, she extracted 3-hourly flood events and their characteristics to support fine-scale flood research. She also proposed an enhanced assimilation algorithm for SWOT, an upcoming satellite providing the first global survey of Earth’s surface water, to improve global discharge simulations. Besides, she conducted research on extreme precipitation and multi-satellite precipitation merging.

At CW3E, Yuan will be working with the hydrology group under the supervision of Dr. Ming Pan. Her research activities will involve using hydrologic models and remote sensing techniques to better understand the fluxes and storages in the global water/energy cycle and its variability at seasonal and long-term scales. She will focus on the terrestrial water cycle and runoff/streamflow in particular. She will also provide hydrology research support for CW3E’s other research programs like the Atmospheric Rivers (AR) program and the Forecast Informed Reservoir Operations (FIRO) program.