Cenlin He

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Project Scientist at NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research

Accurate representation of urban areas in weather and climate models is crucial for simulating interactions between urban surfaces and the atmospheric boundary layer, especially in high-resolution regional models that resolve deep convection. However, many continental-scale simulations use simplified urban parameterizations, raising questions about...

Fires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are a global issue with growing importance. However, the impact of WUI fires on air quality and health is less understood compared to that of fires in wildland. We analyze WUI fire impacts on air quality and health at the global scale using a multi-scale atmospheric chemistry model-the Multi-Scale Infrast...

Accurate estimation of flow discharge is crucial for hydrological modelling, water resources planning, and flood prediction. This study examines seven common runoff schemes within the widely used Noah-Multi-parameterisation (Noah-MP) land surface model (LSM) and evaluates their performance using ERA5-Land runoff data as a benchmark for assessing ru...

Accurate estimation of flow discharge is crucial for hydrological modelling, water resources planning, and flood prediction. This study examines seven common runoff schemes within the widely used Noah-Multi-parameterisation (Noah-MP) land surface model (LSM) and evaluates their performance using ERA5-Land runoff data as a benchmark for assessing ru...

We integrate the refactored community Noah-MP version 5.0 model with the NASA Land Information System (LIS) version 7.5.2 to streamline the synchronization, development, and maintenance of Noah-MP within LIS and to enhance their interoperability and applicability. We evaluate and compare 5-year (2018–2022) global and regional benchmark simulations...

Urban areas are increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, necessitating accurate simulations of urban climates in Earth system models (ESMs) in support of large-scale urban climate adaptation efforts. ESMs underrepresent urban areas due to their small spatial extent and the lack of detailed urban landscape data. To enhance the accur...

The accurate calibration of parameters in atmospheric and Earth system models is crucial for improving their performance but remains a challenge due to their inherent complexity, which is reflected in input–output relationships often characterised by multiple interactions between the parameters, thus hindering the use of simple sensitivity analysis...

The widely used community Noah-MP land surface model currently adopts snow albedo parameterizations that are semiphysical in nature and have systematic biases which impact the accuracy of weather and climate modeling systems that use Noah-MP as the land component. We hypothesized that integrating the snowpack radiative transfer scheme from the late...

Precipitation recycling, where evapotranspiration (ET) from the land surface contributes to precipitation within the same region, is a critical component of the water cycle. This process is especially important for the US Corn Belt, where extensive cropland expansions and irrigation activities have significantly transformed the landscape and affect...

Farmworkers, the frontline workers of our food system, are often exposed to heat stress that is likely to increase in frequency and severity due to climate change. Irrigation can either alleviate or exacerbate heat stress, quantification of which is crucial in intensely irrigated agricultural lands such as the Imperial Valley in southern California...

Farmworkers, the ‘frontline workers’ of our food system, are often exposed to heat stress that is likely to increase in frequency and severity due to climate change. Irrigation can exacerbate heat stress, quantification of which is crucial in intensely irrigated agricultural lands such as the Imperial Valley (IV) in southern California. We present...

Wildfire activity in the western United States (WUS) is increasingly impacting water supply, and land surface models (LSMs) that do not explicitly account for fire disturbances can have critical uncertainties in burned areas. This study quantified responses from the Weather Research and Forecasting Hydrological modelling system (WRF‐Hydro) to a sui...

Snowmelt in the Third Pole, particularly in High Mountain Asia (HMA), is strongly influenced by interactions between aerosols and meteorology. However, understanding these interactions remains uncertain due to their complexity and limitations in existing approaches using model sensitivity and process-denial experiments. In addition, these interacti...

Accurate estimation of flow discharge is crucial for hydrological modelling, water resources planning, and flood prediction. This study examines seven common runoff schemes within the widely-used Noah-MP land surface model and evaluates their performance, using ERA5-Land runoff data as a benchmark for assessing runoff and in-situ streamflow observa...

We introduce University of Texas - GLObal Building heights for Urban Studies (UT-GLOBUS), a dataset providing building heights and urban canopy parameters (UCPs) for more than 1200 city or locales worldwide. UT-GLOBUS combines open-source spaceborne altimetry (ICESat-2 and GEDI) and coarse-resolution urban canopy elevation data with a machine-learn...

Researchers have recently focused on the interplay of the urban heat island (UHI) effect and heat waves (HWs). However, the synergies of these two phenomena remains inconclusive at present. To address this gap, this study investigated UHIs and HWs synergies during the last 30 years in the Tokyo metropolitan area, through a unique and novel approach...

We present a 14-year 12-km hourly air quality dataset created by assimilating satellite observations of aerosol optical depth (AOD) and carbon monoxide (CO) in an air quality model to fill gaps in the contiguous United States (CONUS) air quality monitoring network and help air quality managers understand long-term changes in county level air qualit...

Terrestrial hydrology is altered by fires, particularly in snow‐dominated catchments. However, fire impacts on catchment hydrology are often neglected from land surface model (LSM) simulations. Western U.S. wildfire activity has been increasing in recent decades and is projected to continue increasing over at least the next three decades, and thus...

The accurate calibration of parameters in atmospheric and Earth system models is crucial for improving their performance, but remains a challenge due to their inherent complexity, which is reflected in input-output relationships often characterized by multiple interactions between the parameters and thus hindering the use of simple sensitivity anal...

Fires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are an important issue globally. To understand the change of WUI, we develop a 9-km Worldwide Unified Wildland-Urban Interface (WUWUI) database for 2001-2020 with Random Forest models and satellite data. We find that WUI has been increasing in all populated continents from 2001 to 2020 and the global rela...

Carbonaceous particles play a crucial role in atmospheric radiative forcing. However, our understanding of the behavior and sources of carbonaceous particles in remote regions remains limited. The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is a typical remote region that receives long-range transport of carbonaceous particles from severely polluted areas such as South A...

The accuracy of snow density in land surface model (LSM) simulations impacts the accuracy of simulated terrestrial water and energy budgets. However, there has been little research that has focused on enhancing snow compaction in operationally used LSMs. A baseline snow simulation with the widely used Noah‐MP LSM systematically overestimates snow d...

Purpose of Review During the past decade, weather and climate extremes, enhanced by climate change trends, have received tremendous attention because of their significant impacts on socio-economy, public health, and ecosystems. At the same time, many parts of the world still suffer from severe air pollution issues. However, whether and how air poll...

We enhance the Community Land Model (CLM) snow albedo modeling by implementing several new features with more realistic and physical representations of snow‐aerosol‐radiation interactions. Specifically, we incorporate the following model enhancements: (a) updating ice and aerosol optical properties with more realistic and accurate data sets, (b) ad...

The widely-used Noah-MP land surface model (LSM) currently adopts snow albedo parameterizations that are semi-physical in nature with nontrivial uncertainties. To improve physical representations of snow albedo processes, a state-of-the-art snowpack radiative transfer model, the latest version of Snow, Ice, and Aerosol Radiative (SNICAR) model, is...

Snowmelt in High Mountain Asia is heavily influenced by interactions of aerosols and meteorology. However, uncertainties persist due to the complexity of these interactions, which are typically addressed using myopic approaches and are insufficiently represented in current climate models. Equally ambiguous is the impact of these interactions on sno...

The Multi-Scale Infrastructure for Chemistry and Aerosols Version 0 (MUSICAv0) is a new community modeling infrastructure that enables the study of atmospheric composition and chemistry across all relevant scales. We develop a MUSICAv0 grid with Africa refinement (∼ 28 km × 28 km over Africa). We evaluate the MUSICAv0 simulation for 2017 with in si...

The past decade has witnessed remarkable economic development, marked by rapid industrialization and urbanization across Asian regions. This surge in economic activity has led to significant emissions, resulting in alarming levels of air pollution. Our study comprehensively assessed the spatial and temporal trends of key pollutants, namely nitrogen...

Main Takeaways: 1. Community efforts aiming to advance Noah-MP toward the leading weather and land data assimilation (DA) modeling framework are diverse and substantial. 2. Future Noah-MP priorities in actionable Earth sciences include enhancing capabilities in land DA and modeling hydroclimate extremes and anthropogenic processes. 3. There is a ne...

The widely used open-source community Noah with multi-parameterization options (Noah-MP) land surface model (LSM) is designed for applications ranging from uncoupled land surface hydrometeorological and ecohydrological process studies to coupled numerical weather prediction and decadal global or regional climate simulations. It has been used in man...

The US Northern Great Plains and the Canadian Prairies are known as the world's breadbaskets for their large spring wheat production and exports to the world. It is essential to accurately represent spring wheat growing dynamics and final yield and improve our ability to predict food production under climate change. This study attempts to incorpora...

The representation of aerosols in climate-chemistry models is important for air quality and climate change research, but it can require significant computational resources. The objective of this study was to improve the representation of aerosols in climate-chemistry models, specifically in the carbon bond mechanism, version Z (CBMZ), and modal aer...

A unique, high resolution, hydroclimate re-analysis, 40-plus-year (October 1979 – September 2021) 4-km (named as CONUS404), has been created using the Weather Research and Forecast model by dynamically downscaling of the fifth generation ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) atmospheric reanalysis of the global climate dataset...

We enhance the Community Land Model (CLM) snow albedo modeling by implementing several new features with more realistic and physical representations of snow-aerosol-radiation interactions. Specifically, we incorporate the following model enhancements: (1) updating ice and aerosol optical properties with more realistic and accurate datasets, (2) add...

Rapid retreat and darkening of most glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) are enhanced by the deposition of light-absorbing particles (LAPs). Here, we provided new knowledge on the estimation of albedo reduction caused by black carbon (BC), water-insoluble organic carbon (WIOC), and mineral dust (MD), based on a comprehensive study of snowpit sample...

We quantify future changes in wildfire burned area and carbon emissions in the 21st century under four Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) scenarios and two SSP5-8.5-based solar geoengineering scenarios with a target surface temperature defined by SSP2-4.5 – solar irradiance reduction (G6solar) and stratospheric sulfate aerosol injections (G6sulfu...

The representation of aerosols in climate-chemistry models is important for air quality and climate change research, but it can require significant computational resources. To overcome this, simpler modules such as modal aerosol modules with three lognormal modes (MAM3) can be used. In this study, the coupling of the Carbon Bond Mechanism, version...

The Multi-Scale Infrastructure for Chemistry and Aerosols Version 0 (MUSICAv0) is a new community modeling infrastructure that enables the study of atmospheric composition and chemistry across all relevant scales. We develop a MUSICAv0 grid with Africa refinement (~28 km × 28 km over Africa). We evaluate the MUSICAv0 simulation for 2017 with in sit...

The widely-used open-source community Noah-MP land surface model (LSM) is designed for applications ranging from uncoupled land-surface and ecohydrological process studies to coupled numerical weather prediction and decadal global/regional climate simulations. It has been used in many coupled community weather/climate/hydrology models. In this stud...

Carbon, the human’s most reliable fuel type in the past, must be neutralized in this century towards the Paris Agreement temperature goals. Solar power is widely believed a key fossil fuel substitute, but suffers from the needs of large space occupation and huge energy storage for peak shaving. Here we propose a solar network circumnavigating the g...

Drought monitoring and forecasting systems are used in the United States (U.S.) to inform drought management decisions. Drought forecasting efforts have often been conducted and evaluated at coarse spatial resolutions (i.e., >10-km), which miss key local drought information at higher resolutions. Addressing the importance of forecasting drought at...

The purpose of this technical note is to comprehensively describe the widely-used community Noah-MP land surface modeling system version 5.0, including its modernized (refactored) model infrastructure, new code and data structures, and model biogeophysical and biogeochemical processes and parameterizations. Scientific justification and assessment o...

This work describes the development of a hybrid 100-m global land cover dataset and its implementation in the state-of-the-art Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model version 4.5. This hybrid CGLC-MODIS-LCZ dataset is based on 1) the Copernicus Global Land Service Land Cover (CGLC) product resampled to MODIS IGBP classes (CGLC-MODIS), and 2) t...

The US Northern Great Plains and the Canadian Prairies are known as the world’s breadbaskets for its large spring wheat production and exports to the world. It is essential to accurately represent spring wheat growing dynamics and final yield and improve our ability to predict food production under climate change. This study attempts to incorporate...

Mineral dust aerosols impact the energy budget of Earth through interactions with radiation, clouds, atmospheric chemistry, the cryosphere and biogeochemistry. In this Review, we summarize these interactions and assess the resulting impacts of dust, and of changes in dust, on global climate and climate change. The total effect of dust interactions...

We quantify future changes of wildfire burned area and carbon emissions in the 21st century under four Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) scenarios and two SSP5-8.5-based solar geoengineering scenarios with a target surface temperature defined by SSP2-4.5: solar irradiance reduction (G6solar) and stratospheric sulfate aerosol injections (G6sulfur...

With the highest albedo of the land surface, snow plays a vital role in Earth's surface energy budget and water cycle. Snow albedo is primarily controlled by snow grain properties (e.g., size and shape) and light-absorbing particles (LAPs) such as black carbon (BC) and dust. The mixing state of LAPs in snow also has impacts on LAP-induced snow albe...

This study contributes to the body of current knowledge about the urban effect on extreme precipitation (EP) by investigating the city-EP interaction over Lagos, Nigeria. This is a unique, first-time study that adds a “missing piece” of this information about the African continent to the comprehensive global urban precipitation “picture”. The conve...

Mineral dust contributes up to one-half of surface aerosol loading in spring over the southwestern United States, posing an environmental challenge that threatens human health and the ecosystem. Using self-organizing map (SOM) analysis with dust deposition and flux data from WRF-Chem and Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applicatio...

Black carbon (BC) can be transported over long distances and is an important trigger of climate warming and glacier melting at remote high mountains and polar regions. It is normally assumed that the variation of BC flux in remote regions is dominated by its emissions. However, after a comprehensive investigation of potential influencing factors on...

Anthropogenically forced-warming and La Niña forced-precipitation deficits caused at least a sixfold risk increase for compound extreme low precipitation and high temperature in California–Nevada from October 2020 to September 2021.

The article “Urbanization Impact on Regional Climate and Extreme Weather: Current Understanding, Uncertainties, and Future Research Directions”, written by Yun QIAN, TC CHAKRABORTY, Jianfeng LI, Dan LI, Cenlin HE, Chandan SARANGI, Fei CHEN, Xuchao YANG, and L. Ruby LEUNG was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on...

The Biosphere-Atmosphere Transfer Scheme (BATS) ground snow albedo algorithm is commonly used in land-surface models (LSM), weather forecasting and research applications. This study addresses key uncertainties in BATS simulated ground snow albedo within the Noah-MP LSM framework through evaluation and optimization of the Noah-MP BATS ground snow al...

Plain Language Summary Understanding the changes in snow cover (SC) over glaciers in High Mountain Asia (HMA) is important yet challenging. Despite its impact on water resources, physical processes that drive these changes are complex. In particular, large‐scale weather patterns, together with aerosol pollution hotspots in the vicinity, and its ste...

Mineral dust aerosols impact Earth’s energy budget through interactions with radiation, clouds, atmospheric chemistry, the cryosphere and biogeochemistry. In this review, we summarize these interactions and assess the resulting impacts of dust, and of changes in dust, on global climate and climate change. We find that the total effect of these inte...

We analyze the effects of the diurnal cycle of fire emissions (DCFE) and plume rise on U.S. air quality using the MUSICAv0 (Multi‐Scale Infrastructure for Chemistry and Aerosols Version 0) model during the FIREX‐AQ (Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality) and WE‐CAN (Western wildfire Experiment for Cloud chemistry, Aeroso...

Carbonaceous particles are an important radiative forcing agent in the atmosphere, with large temporal and spatial variations in their concentrations and compositions, especially in remote regions. This study reported the Δ¹⁴C and δ¹³C of total carbon (TC) and water-insoluble particulate carbon (IPC) of the total suspended particles (TSP) and PM2.5...

A new machine learning approach trained on winter and spring climate conditions offers improved forecasts of summer fire activity across the western United States.

We collected surface snow samples from three different glaciers – Yala, Thana, and Sachin – in the central and western Himalayas to understand the spatial variability and radiative impacts of light-absorbing particles. The Yala and Thana glaciers in Nepal and Bhutan, respectively, were selected to represent the central Himalayas. The Sachin glacier...

Mineral dust contributes up to one-half of surface aerosol loading in spring over the southwestern U.S., posing an environmental challenge that threatens human health and the ecosystem. Using the self-organizing map (SOM) analysis, we identify four typical dust transport patterns across the Sierra Nevada, associated with the mesoscale winds, Sierra...

We quantified the combined effects of mineral dust nonsphericity and size on snow albedo reduction using the MOPSMAP (Modeled optical properties of ensembles of aerosol particles) package and SAMDS (Spectral Albedo Model for Dirty Snow) with the consideration of dust from Sahara, Greenland, San Juan Mountains, and Tibetan Plateau. Results indicate...

Environmental context Snow albedo plays an important role in the Earth environment. Light-absorbing particles (LAPs) can significantly impact snow albedo through complex interactions and feedbacks over the global cryosphere. This study provides a unique review of the fundamentals, recent advances, challenges and future research directions in modell...

Plain Language Summary Snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada receive large amounts of light‐absorbing particles [LAPs, mainly dust and black carbon (BC)], which decrease snow albedo, induce additional radiative forcing, alter the balance between snowmelt water supply and water demand, and influence the survival and resource selection of the Sierra Nevada...

Accurate prediction of cloud radiative effect (CRE) is important to weather forecast and climate projection, and solar energy production—a major renewable energy source toward decarbonization. Here, we evaluate the capability of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model to simulate solar irradiance on a short‐term timescale (days) against obser...

This study predicts summer (June-September) fire burned area across the western United States (U.S.) from 1984-2020 using ensembles of statistical models trained with pre-fire season climate conditions. Winter and spring climate conditions alone explain up to 53% of the interannual variability and 58% of the increasing trend of observed summer burn...

With the highest albedo of the land surface, snow plays a vital role in Earth’s surface energy and water cycles. Snow albedo is greatly affected by snow grain properties (e.g., size and shape) and light absorbing particles (LAPs) such as black carbon (BC) and dust. The mixing state of LAPs in snow also has large impacts on LAP-induced snow albedo r...

As an important component of carbonaceous particles, organic carbon (OC) plays a significant role in radiative forcing in the atmosphere. Recently, the warming effect of light-absorbing OC has been emphasized. Water-soluble organic carbon (WSOC) is commonly used as a surrogate to investigate the light absorption of OC. Thus far, filters with 0.45 μ...

This study assesses the quality of carbon monoxide (CO) simulations from the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) and analyzes different processes controlling CO distribution in Africa. Sixteen CO tracers are implemented in WRF-Chem to track CO from different sources and regions. The model captures the seasonal c...

Urban environments lie at the confluence of social, cultural, and economic activities and have unique biophysical characteristics due to continued infrastructure development that generally replaces natural landscapes with built-up structures. The vast majority of studies on urban perturbation of local weather and climate have been centered on the u...

Accurate snow albedo simulation is a prerequisite for climate models to produce reliable climate prediction. Climate models would benefit from schemes of snowpack radiative transfer that are responsive to changing atmospheric conditions. However, the uncertainties in the narrowband snow optical parameters used by these schemes have not been evaluat...

Black carbon (BC) strongly absorbs solar radiation, contributing to global warming. Absorption enhancement of BC particles is difficult to quantify due to an inadequate representation of their complex morphology and mixing structures, as well as interaction with radiation. Here, we apply a 3D method accounting for detailed BC mixing structures to p...

The Snow, Ice, and Aerosol Radiative (SNICAR) model has been used in various capacities over the last 15 years to model the spectral albedo of snow with light-absorbing constituents (LACs). Recent studies have extended the model to include an adding-doubling two-stream solver and representations of non-spherical ice particles; carbon dioxide snow;...

Wuhan was locked down from 23 January to 8 April 2020 to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Both public and private transportation in Wuhan and its neighboring cities in Hubei Province were suspended or restricted, and the manufacturing industry was partially shut down. This study collected and investigated ground...