Chenghao Wang

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Verified

Chenghao verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Oklahoma

Urban trees are one of the most effective strategies to mitigate excessive heat stress in cities. To understand the underlying mechanisms of their cooling effect and to assess their use in urban planning, the accurate simulation of how trees interact with the ambient built environment is critical and imperative. However, the representation of urban...

Urban heat island (UHI) effect poses great challenges to urban environmental quality, building energy consumption, and public health. Over decades, research efforts have been made to develop and evaluate different UHI mitigation strategies. Governments, organizations, and commercial companies have also been working to develop building codes, standa...

In response to increasing life expectancies and urbanization, initiatives for age-friendly cities seek to facilitate active and healthy aging by strengthening supports and services for older people. While laudable, these efforts typically neglect early-life exposures that influence long-term well-being. With a focus on the urban physical environmen...

Climate, technologies, and socio-economic changes will influence future building energy use in cities. However, current low-resolution regional and state-level analyses are insufficient to reliably assist city-level decision-making. Here we estimate mid-century hourly building energy consumption in 277 U.S. urban areas using a bottom-up approach. T...

Recent advances in urban climate modeling resolution have improved the representation of complex urban environments, with large‐eddy simulation (LES) as a key approach, capturing not only building effects but also urban vegetation and other critical urban processes. Coupling these ultrafine‐resolution (hectometric and finer) approaches with larger‐...

Forests significantly influence local temperature dynamics, although the specifics of their impacts and mechanisms exhibit global variability. This study investigates the cooling or warming effects of global forests from 2001 to 2021 using multi-satellite data. The results indicate that (1) boreal forests exhibit a significant warming effect of +1....

Urban trees play a pivotal role in mitigating heat, yet the global determinants and patterns of their cooling efficiency (CE) remain elusive. Here we quantify the diel CE of 229 cities across four climatic zones and employ a machine-learning model to assess the influence of variables on CE. We found that for every 10% increase in tree cover, surfac...

Methane (CH4) contributes significantly to global warming. However, accurate identification of CH4 sources for reducing CH4 emissions is often hampered by inadequate accuracy and spatiotemporal coverage of CH4 detection, and lack of accurate CH4 forward modeling used in top‐down inversion systems. In this study, a field experiment was conducted in...

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...

Reliable and continuous meteorological data are crucial for modeling the responses of energy systems and their components to weather and climate conditions, particularly in densely populated urban areas. However, existing long-term datasets often suffer from spatial and temporal gaps and inconsistencies, posing great challenges for detailed urban e...

Urban planners and other stakeholders often view trees as the ultimate panacea for mitigating urban heat stress; however, their cooling efficacy varies globally and is influenced by three primary factors: tree traits, urban morphology, and climate conditions. This study analyzes 182 studies on the cooling effects of urban trees across 17 climates i...

Seasonal snow in the extratropical Andes is a primary water source for major rivers supplying water for drinking, agriculture, and hydroelectric power in Central Chile. Here, we used estimates from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to analyze changes in snow cover extent over the period 2001–2022 in a total of 18 watersheds...

Urban Land Surface Models (ULSMs) simulate energy and water exchanges between the urban surface and atmosphere. However, earlier systematic ULSM comparison projects assessed the energy balance but ignored the water balance, which is coupled to the energy balance. Here, we analyze the water balance representation in 19 ULSMs participating in the Urb...

South America is experiencing severe impacts from climate change. Although the warming of the subcontinent closely follows the global path, the rise of temperatures has been more pronounced in some regions, which have also seen a parallel increment in the occurrence of droughts and weather conditions associated with enhanced fire risk. Here, we use...

Eulerian and Lagrangian numerical moisture tracking models, which are primarily used to quantify moisture contributions from global sources to specific regions, play a crucial role in hydrology and (paleo)climatology studies on the Tibetan Plateau (TP). Despite their widespread applications in the TP region, potential discrepancies in their moistur...

Land surface temperature (LST) derived from satellite observations and weather modeling has been widely used for investigating Earth surface-atmosphere energy exchange and radiation budget. However, satellite-derived LST has a trade-off between spatial and temporal resolutions and missing observations caused by clouds, while there are limitations s...

Substantial nutrient inputs from reservoir impoundment typically increase sedimentation rate and primary production. This can greatly enhance methane (CH4) production, making reservoirs potentially significant sources of atmospheric CH4. Consequently, elucidating CH4 emissions from reservoirs is crucial for assessing their role in the global methan...

Benzene as one type of hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) is produced by industrial production processes and/or emitted during upset events caused by man-made or natural accidents. Although upset emissions of benzene can be a significant contributor to the total emission, it is still challenging to quantify. This study first develops a fast modeling f...

Global climate changes, especially the rise of global mean temperature due to the increased carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration, can, in turn, result in higher anthropogenic and biogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This potentially leads to a positive loop of climate–carbon feedback in the Earth’s climate system, which calls for sustainable environmen...

Previous studies on the cooling of urban vegetation mainly focused on its transpiration or shading effect separately, neglecting to explore the combined evapotranspiration-shading cooling. Further, accurate quantification of evapotranspiration-shading cooling remains challenging due to heterogeneity of urban landscapes, which limits understanding o...

Global climate change has been shown to cause longer, more intense, and frequent heatwaves, of which anthropogenic stressors concentrated in urban areas are a critical contributor. In this study, we investigate the causal interactions during heatwaves across 520 urban sites in the U.S. combining complex network and causal analysis. The presence of...

Urban Land Surface Models (ULSMs) simulate energy and water exchanges between the urban surface and atmosphere. When part of numerical weather prediction, ULSMs provide a lower boundary for the atmosphere and improve the applicability of model results in the urban environment compared with non-urban land surface models. However, earlier systematic...

Beyond traditional meteorological and (paleo)climatological analyses, numerical moisture tracking provides a quantitative diagnosis of moisture sources to the Tibetan Plateau (TP). While existing studies predominantly employ either the Eulerian or Lagrangian method, the potential differences in their simulations and the underlying causes of these d...

Rapid increases in heat exposure in urban areas, fueled by both climate change and urban heat islands (UHI), are manifesting as a pressing concern. Planting and conserving urban trees is one of the pivotal strategies in mitigating outdoor heat and optimizing thermal comfort. We present an integrated review and meta-analysis of 131 studies conducted...

Rapid increases in heat exposure in urban areas, fueled by both climate change and urban heat islands (UHI), are manifesting as a pressing concern. Planting and conserving urban trees is one of the pivotal strategies in mitigating outdoor heat and optimizing thermal comfort. We present an integrated review and meta-analysis of 131 studies conducted...

Rapid increases in heat exposure in urban areas, fueled by both climate change and urban heat islands (UHI), are manifesting as a pressing concern. Planting and conserving urban trees is one of the pivotal strategies in mitigating outdoor heat and optimizing thermal comfort. We present an integrated review and meta-analysis of 131 studies conducted...

A string of fierce fires broke out in Chile in the austral summer 2023, just six years after the record-breaking 2017 fire season. Favored by extreme weather conditions, fire activity has dramatically risen in recent years in this Andean country. A total of 1.7 million ha. burned during the last decade, tripling figures of the prior decade. Six of...

The production of waste as a consequence of human activities is one of the most fundamental challenges facing our society and global ecological systems. Waste generation is rapidly increasing, with corresponding shifts in the structure of our societies, where almost all nations are moving from rural agrarian societies to urban and technological one...

Estuaries play an important role in the global nitrous oxide budget. However, considerable uncertainties exist in estimating their nitrous oxide emissions, largely due to anthropogenic impacts, particularly wastewater discharge. Here we investigate nitrous oxide emission dynamics in the Pearl River Estuary through advanced high-resolution, real-tim...

Accurately predicting weather and climate in cities is critical for safeguarding human health and strengthening urban resilience. Multimodel evaluations can lead to model improvements; however, there have been no major intercomparisons of urban‐focussed land surface models in over a decade. Here, in Phase 1 of the Urban‐PLUMBER project, we evaluate...

This study analyzes heat waves (HWs), air pollution (AP) episodes, and compound HW and AP events (CE) in the urban environment and provides a comparison between events in urban areas (UAs) and rural areas (RAs). A 1-km gridded daily minimum temperature dataset and a 1-km gridded daily PM2.5 concentration dataset were used along with geospatial data...

Cities in the global south face dire climate impacts. It is in socioeconomically marginalized urban communities of the global south that the effects of climate change are felt most deeply. Santiago de Chile, a major mid-latitude Andean city of 7.7 million inhabitants, is already undergoing the so-called “climate penalty” as rising temperatures wors...

Plain Language Summary Successful detection of causality in complex systems is important to unraveling the underlying mechanisms of system dynamics. The dynamic interactions in Earth's climate system are often nonlinear, weakly or moderately coupled, and essentially non‐separable, which renders conventional approaches of causal inference, such as s...

Evaporation from global oceans is an important moisture source for glaciers and headwaters of major Asian rivers in the Tibetan Plateau (TP). Although the accelerated global hydrological cycle, the altered sea–land thermal contrast and the amplified warming rate over the TP during the past several decades are known to have profound effects on the r...

The quantification of cross-regional interactions for the atmospheric transport processes is of crucial importance to improve the predictive capacity of climatic and environmental system modeling. The dynamic interactions in these complex systems are often nonlinear and non-separable, making conventional approaches of causal inference, such as stat...

Assessing the dynamics of vegetation and its response to environmental changes is essential to understanding ecosystem changes and the sustainable use of natural resources. In this study, we investigated the impacts of climate change and human activities on vegetation growth in the Hanjiang River Basin. We classified the basin into the portion main...

Urban overheating aggravated by climate change and rapid urbanization poses a severe threat to thermal health of urban residents. To more realistically represent street-level heat stress, we propose a new urban climate-human coupling system by integrating an advanced urban canopy model (UCM) with a new human-environment adaptive thermal stress (HEA...

The production of waste as a consequence of human activities is one of the most fundamental challenges facing our society and global ecological systems. Waste generation is rapidly increasing, with corresponding shifts in the structure of our societies where almost all nations are moving from rural agrarian societies to urban and technological ones...

Reducing methane emissions is essential for mitigating global warming. To attribute methane emissions to their sources, a comprehensive dataset of methane source infrastructure is necessary. Recent advancements with deep learning on remotely sensed imagery have the potential to identify the locations and characteristics of methane sources, but ther...

The replacement of natural lands with urban structures has multiple environmental consequences , yet little is known about the magnitude and extent of albedo-induced warming contributions from urbanization at the global scale in the past and future. Here, we apply an empirical approach to quantify the climate effects of past urbanization and future...

As the number of older adults increases, disproportionate impacts of climate change pose great challenges to healthy longevity. These inequities will be compounded in future generations. Large-scale climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies require often unavailable institutional, financial, and technical support. We need to quickly devel...

Evaporation from global oceans is an important moisture source of glaciers and headwaters of major Asia rivers in the Tibetan Plateau (TP). Although recent accelerated global hydrological cycle, altered sea-land thermal contrast, and amplified warming rate over the TP are known to have profound effects on the regional water balance, the contributio...

One critical challenge of studying Earth's hydroclimate system, in the face of global environmental changes, is to predict whether the system approaches a critical threshold. Here, we identified the critical transitions of hydrological processes, including precipitation and potential evapotranspiration, by analyzing their early-warning signals and...

Increased wealth and per capita energy use have transformed lives and shaped societies, but energy poverty remains a global challenge. Previous research has shown positive relationships among metrics of health and happiness and economic indices such as income and gross domestic product and between energy use and human development. To our knowledge,...

The Andes span more than 7,000 km along western South America and its snowpack is an important source of water for many communities. As other snow-covered regions around the world, the Andes are sensitive to Black Carbon (BC) deposition from fossil fuel and biomass combustion. BC darkens the snow surface, reduces the albedo, and accelerates melting...

Black carbon (BC) from fossil fuel and biomass combustion darkens the snow and makes it melt sooner. The BC footprint of research activities and tourism in Antarctica has likely increased as human presence in the continent has surged in recent decades. Here, we report on measurements of the BC concentration in snow samples from 28 sites across a tr...

Reliable simulations of historical and future climate are critical to assessing ecological and hydrological responses over the Third Pole region (TP; the area including the Himalaya–Hindu Kush mountain range and the Tibetan Plateau). In this study, we evaluate the historical and future temperature and precipitation simulations of 18 models from pha...

Methane (CH4) emissions from freshwater aquatic systems such as rivers and reservoirs are an important component of the global methane budget. However, the estimation can be largely affected by the spatial and temporal resolutions of measurements. Especially, the lack of high-resolution studies in the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR), one of the larges...

Surface albedo is an important forcing parameter that drives the radiative energy budget as it determines the fraction of the downwelling solar irradiance that the surface reflects. Here we report on ground-based measurements of the spectral albedo (350–2200 nm) carried out at 20 sites across a North–South transect of approximately 1300 km in the A...

Precipitation changes in the Three Gorges Reservoir Region (TGRR) play a critical role in the operation and regulation of the Three Gorges Dam (TGD) and the protection of residents and properties. The potential impacts of the TGD on local and regional circulation patterns, especially the precipitation patterns, have received considerable attention...

Global urbanization amidst climate and environmental change poses numerous challenges to the healthy aging of populations. To better support century-long lives in an aging society, substantial changes in various aspects of the current world, especially in the domain of Environment and Climate, are imperative. In this report, we focus on two key asp...

The synergistic effect of urban heat island (UHI) and urban moisture island (UMI) aggravates the heat stress during hot summers. To investigate the mechanisms of UHI and UMI, we developed an advanced urban canopy model with more robust predictability of the urban surface heat and moisture budgets by considering dynamic building-tree-air interaction...

Urban climate research has surged in the past decades due to its unique position in addressing the concomitant issues of the rapid global urbanization and emergent climate changes. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of holistic and system-based toolkit for investigating complex dynamics of urban climate systems, especially those of hydroclimate ex...

In this study, we identified the critical transitions of hydrological processes including precipitation and potential evapotranspiration by analysing their early-warning signals and system-based network structures. The statistical early-warning signals are manifest in increasing trends of autocorrelation and variance in the hydrology system ranging...

Sustainable development of cities and communities under climate change calls for effective and pragmatic strategies to mitigate urban heat island (UHI) during hot seasons. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of UHI mitigation measures can be affected by public perceptions during planning and implementation processes. However, the general perceptions of UH...

Precipitation change in the Three Gorges Reservoir Region (TGRR) plays a critical role in the operation and regulation of the Three Gorges Dam (TGD) as well as the protection of residents and properties. The potential impacts of the TGD on local and regional circulation patterns, especially the precipitation patterns, have received considerable att...

Continuous urbanization due to growing population has given rise to the urban heat island (UHI) effect, a phenomenon that urban areas usually have higher temperature when compared to their surrounding rural environment. The higher temperature in cities also significantly affects energy use, air quality, residential water use, and greenhouse gas emi...

Natural vegetation in arid and semi-arid environments is usually water-limited, while the urbanization process alters its phenology through anthropogenic activities such as irrigation and fertilization. In particular, urban irrigation has also been used as one of the strategies to alleviate heat stress during hot seasons. In this study, we aim to e...

As one of the most sensitive areas to climate change, drylands cover ~40% of the Earth's terrestrial land surface and host more than 38% of the global population. Meanwhile, their response to climate change and variability carries large uncertainties as induced by background climate, topography, and land cover composition; but there is a lack of in...

Cities are the hotspots of global human–environment interactions, and their sustainable development requires proactive strategies to mitigate and adapt to emergent environmental issues. Nevertheless, most of the existing studies and strategies are based on specific (and often singular) environmental processes, and their efficacy is largely undermin...

Model evaluation is a critical component in the development and applications of environmental modeling systems. Conventional metrics such as Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r), root-mean-square error (RMSE), and mean absolute error (MAE), albeit process-based and limited to point-to-point statistical comparison, have been widely use...

Plain Language Summary Critical transitions have been identified in global and regional climate systems, during which a small perturbation can lead to a qualitative change. They are notoriously difficult to predict and can have potential catastrophic impacts on ecosystems and human society. However, certain characteristics may exist prior to such t...

Exposure to extreme temperatures is one primary cause of weather-related human mortality and morbidity. Global climate change raises the concern of public health under future extreme events, yet spatiotemporal population dynamics have been long overlooked in health risk assessments. Here, we show that the diurnal intra-urban movement alters residen...

Our world has been continuously urbanized and is currently accommodating more than half of the human population. Despite that cities cover only <3% of the Earth's land surface area, they emerged as focal points of human activities, and confront numerous environmental challenges as a result of changes in landscapes, hydroclimate, ecosystems, and bio...

The use of shade trees is among favorable urban planning strategies to improve outdoor thermal comfort and promote energy efficiency. Meanwhile, the presence of trees alters flow patterns and turbulent transport and influences the dispersion of air pollutants. In this study, we investigated the effects of urban trees on air pollutant dispersion in...

Exacerbated heat stress has resulted in a series of environmental issues in urban areas. Mounting empirical evidence shows that urban trees are effective in mitigating the thermal stress in the built environment, whereas large‐scale numerical simulations remain scarce. In this study, the effects of shade trees on the built environment, in terms of...

Built terrains, with their complexity in morphology, high heterogeneity, and anthropogenic impact, impose substantial challenges in Earth-system modelling. In particular, estimation of the source areas and footprints of atmospheric measurements in cities requires realistic representation of the landscape characteristics and flow physics in urban ar...

The rapid urbanization and associated landscape changes strongly modulate heat and moisture transfer processes on the urban surface as well as in the planetary boundary layer (PBL) via urban land-atmosphere interactions. In this study, we employed the mesoscale Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with realistic urban dynamics to assess the...

Elevated concentration of atmospheric aerosols during severe urban air pollution episodes necessitates a deep understanding of the underlying determinants for a sustainable urban environment. The 15-year (2001–2015) Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aerosol optical depth (AOD) data for the Phoenix and Los Angeles Metropolitan Ar...

Urban development is characterized by drastic land use and land cover changes, rooted in urban population growth, with concomitant anthropogenic stressors contributing to global climate changes. While there is extensive literature on predicting future urban climate using biogeophysical models, the link between emergent meteorological patterns and t...

Urban environment contributes significantly to the global carbon cycle with complex governing mechanisms due to the combined biospheric and anthropogenic contributors. In this study, we analyzed the patterns of boundary-layer CO2 flux and concentration for a residential neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona using the eddy covariance technique and a sing...

Urban environmental measurements and observational statistics should reflect the properties generated over an adjacent area of adequate length where homogeneity is usually assumed. The determination of this characteristic source area that gives sufficient representation of the horizontal coverage of a sensing instrument or the fetch of transported...

Aquatic systems are sources of greenhouse gases on different scales, however the uncertainty of gas fluxes estimated using popular methods are not well defined. Here we show that greenhouse gas fluxes across the air-water interface of seas and inland waters are significantly underestimated by the currently used static floating chamber (SFC) method....

Two diel field campaigns under different weather patterns were carried out in the summer and autumn of 2013 to measure CO 2 and CH 4 fluxes and to probe the rates of gas exchange across the airÁwater interface in a subtropical eutrophic pond in China. Bubble emissions of CH 4 accounted for 99.7 and 91.67% of the total CH 4 emission measured at two...

For the first time we report on real time diel bubble and diffusion gas fluxes lasting for 48 hours of a subtropical shallow pond. The averaged diffusion fluxes of methane and carbon dioxide were 0.074 and 62.70 mg•m-2•h-1, and the averaged ebullition fluxes of methane and carbon dioxide were 24.726 and 1.92 mg•m-2•h-1 respectively. Bubble emission...

The utility model discloses an air sample and inhalable particle sampler which comprises an air inlet pipe, wherein the air inlet pipe is sequentially connected with an air inlet of an aspirator pump and an air inlet of an air inlet converter; two air outlets of the air inlet converter are respectively connected with an air sample collecting contai...

The utility model relates to an automatic flood diversion and aerating system for urban landscape river channels. The automatic flood diversion and aerating system comprises the lower river channel, a water inlet of the lower river channel is formed below a water inlet of the upper river channel, at least two flood diversion river channels are form...

With the development of economy, waterway transportation has become the main transportation means in the process of international trade and domestic trade. When it comes to sustainable development, waterway transportation plays an important role in promoting the development of the national economy. Based on the sustainable development theory, its c...