Zhenzhong Zeng

Southern University of Science and Technology | SUSTech · School of Environmental Science and Engineering

Growing global energy use and the adoption of sustainability goals to limit carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning are increasing the demand for clean energy, including solar. Floating photovoltaic (FPV) systems on reservoirs are advantageous over traditional ground-mounted solar systems in terms of land conservation, efficiency improvement and...

The benefits of developing the world’s hydropower potential are intensely debated when considering the need to avoid or minimize environmental impacts. However, estimates of global unused profitable hydropower potential with strict environmental constraints have rarely been reported. In this study we performed a global assessment of the unused prof...

Terrestrial ecosystems are fully coupled with the climate. The planet has been greening owing to the increased vegetation growth in response to the changing atmosphere, which in turn has feedback on the climate. Greening has slowed down the rise in global land-surface air temperature mainly through a coincident increase of evapotranspiration and pr...

The heavy storm event that occurred from 18 to 22 July 2021, in Henan province caused severe floods and casualties, especially in the provincial city, Zhengzhou. While the impacts of large‐scale synoptic systems and local‐scale orographic effects on the storm event have been studied, the role of urbanization remains unexplored. Using Weather Resear...

China has realized a 56-fold increase in installed wind capacity, from 5.9 GW in 2007 to 328 GW in 2021. In addition to increasing installed capacity, plans to substantially increase wind energy production for climate change mitigation also depend on future wind speeds, which strongly influences the efficiencies of installed turbines within individ...

Sediment trapping by hydropower dams is one major cause of sediment starvation in global river deltas, but how climate change would influence the damming-induced sediment starvation remains unexplored. The Mekong River is the most important international river in Asia with rich biodiversity and massive hydropower potential. Here, we model the combi...

Along with the development of remote sensing technology, the spatial–temporal variability of vegetation productivity has been well observed. However, the drivers controlling the variation in vegetation under various climate gradients remain poorly understood. Identifying and quantifying the independent effects of driving factors on a natural proces...

Remote sensing has become a data source long ago for estimating evapotranspiration (ET), but often with a dilemma between temporal and spatial resolution. The recent ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) reaches a satisfactory compromise. It provides 70 m spatial resolution and an average 4-day revisit cycl...

Wind speed is crucial for climate change studies and the renewable energy sector. In-situ observations from weather stations are direct measurements and have relatively higher accuracy, providing first-hand data for wind speed research. However, station-based wind speed records are sparsely distributed spatially and their time series are inhomogene...

Abstract Large‐scale reforestation can potentially bring both benefits and risks to the water cycle, which needs to be better quantified under future climates to inform reforestation decisions. We identified 477 water‐insecure basins worldwide accounting for 44.6% (380.2 Mha) of the global reforestation potential. As many of these basins are in the...

The sixth assessment report of the IPCC indicates low-to-high confidence in trends of extreme rainfall with regional inconsistency in the tropics, where a key phenomenon causing intra-seasonal variations in weather is the Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO). It remains unknown how the MJO-induced extreme rainfall and the societal exposure may change in...

Originating from the temperature gradient radically caused by solar radiation, wind energy is renewable and emission-free. Besides, the global potential is up to 1,300 PWh per year, about eight times of the global annual energy consumption. Therefore, wind power is considered as one of the most important energy sources to replace fossil fuels for a...

Carbon and nitrogen losses from degraded wetlands and methane emissions from flooded wetlands are both important sources of greenhouse gas emissions. However, the net-exchange dependence on hydrothermal conditions and wetland integrity remains unclear. Using a global-scale in situ database on net greenhouse gas exchanges, we show diverse hydrology-...

Irrigation can substantially alter the hydrologic and biogeochemical cycles in river basins. However, little attention has been given to the quantitative evaluation of the effects of irrigation on both of these cycles. In this study, we utilized the latest version of the Community Land Model (CLM5) to assess the effects of irrigation on the water,...

Submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) has been widely recognized as an important source of dissolved nutrients in coastal waters and affects nutrient biogeochemistry. In contrast, little information is available on SGD impacts on coastal carbon budgets. Here, we assessed the SGD and associated carbon (dissolved inorganic carbon [DIC] and total alka...

Crop water use (also know as evapotranspiraton, ET) monitoring is vital for agricultural management under the threat of water scarcity and global warming, as well as the pressure of increasing food demand. The ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) has provided valuable high-resolution ET estimates since its...

We describe an undocumented change in how calm periods in near-surface wind speed (and direction) observations have been encoded in a subset of global datasets of sub-daily data after 2013. This has resulted in the under-estimation of the number of calm periods for meteorological stations across much of Asia and Europe. Hence average wind speeds af...

Buildings play an increasingly important role to determine the trend of CO2 emissions in cities. Whether CO2 emissions from buildings can be effectively mitigated has great significance for cities to achieve climate governance goals. The study takes Shenzhen, a China’s megacity, as an example to examine how the penetration of newly emerging clean t...

Global warming-induced melting and thawing of the cryosphere are severely altering the volume and timing of water supplied from High Mountain Asia, adversely affecting downstream food and energy systems that are relied on by billions of people. The construction of more reservoirs designed to regulate streamflow and produce hydropower is a critical...

Previous estimates of tropical forest carbon loss in the twenty-first century using satellite data typically focus on its magnitude, whereas regional loss trajectories and associated drivers are rarely reported. Here we used different high-resolution satellite datasets to show a doubling of gross tropical forest carbon loss worldwide from 0.97 ± 0....

The impact of rapid urbanization on the spatiotemporal pattern of short-term extreme precipitation in China remains unclear at the subnational scale. In this study, we present a general framework that measures urbanization-induced variation in hourly extreme wet season precipitation (April–October) from 1985 to 2012, with reference to a dynamic urb...

As forest loss is accelerating in tropical mountains globally, protected areas (PAs) are seen as bastions to protect sensitive ecosystems, preserve biodiversity, and safeguard headwater catchments from degradation. However, the effectiveness of PAs in preventing forest conversion has rarely been determined. Complicating the issue is that many PAs a...

Earth satellites have observed continuous increasing vegetation growth during the past four decades, a phenomenon called Earth greening. Nearly all Earth System Models (ESMs) participating in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) project a continuous greening of the planet during the 21st...

Pan evaporation (Epan) reflects the evaporation potential of surface water and is a key indicator of atmospheric evaporative demand. Previous studies have found a substantial decrease in Epan across China, dominated by declining wind speed and solar radiation before the late 2000s. However, how Epan responds to the recovery of wind speed and solar...

Compound hot extremes (ChotEs) that refer to continuous heats throughout days and nights are projected to increase, causing more serious impacts on human health than daytime or nighttime heats alone. Previous studies have focused on daytime heats, but the timing of substantial increase in ChotEs relative to natural variability, which is defined as...

The decarbonisation of the iron and steel industry, contributing approximately 8% of current global anthropogenic CO2 emissions, is challenged by the persistently growing global steel demand and limitations of techno-economically feasible options for low-carbon steelmaking. Here we explore the inherent potential of recovering energy and re-using ma...

The biggest sand-dust storm from Mongolia in the past decade swept across northern China on March 15, 2021. Mongolia and northern China have experienced an unusual trend of drying and...

Reforestation is an eco-friendly strategy for countering rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and the negative effects of forest loss and degradation. China, with one of the world’s most considerable afforestation rates, has increased its forest cover from 16.6% 20 years ago to 23.0% by 2020. However, the maximum potential forest...

Dust emissions influence global climate while simultaneously reducing the productive potential and resilience of landscapes to climate stressors, together impacting food security and human health. Vegetation is a major control on dust emission because it extracts momentum from the wind and shelters the soil surface, protecting dry and loose materia...

Southeast Asia contains about half of all tropical mountain forests, which are rich in biodiversity and carbon stocks, yet there is debate as to whether regional mountain forest cover has increased or decreased in recent decades. Here, our analysis of high-resolution satellite datasets reveals increasing mountain forest loss across Southeast Asia....

More than 50% of global lakes periodically freeze, and their lake ice phenology is sensitive to climate change. However, spatially detailed quantification of the changes in lake ice at the global scale is not available. Here, we map ice cover in >33,000 lakes throughout the North Temperate Zone (23.5-66.5°N) using 0.55 million Landsat images from 1...

Land surface schemes (LSSs) in Earth System Models simulate how vegetation regulates land-atmosphere fluxes of heat, water, carbon, and momentum. Despite advances in the spatial resolution of regional climate modeling, significant land cover changes occured at sub-grid scale still not properly treated. Here, we investigate the response of evapotran...

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has great potential for timely monitoring of flood information as it penetrates the clouds during flood events. Moreover, the proliferation of SAR satellites with high spatial and temporal resolution provides a tremendous opportunity to understand the flood risk and its quick response. However, traditional algorithms...

To investigate changes in global wind speed phenomena, we constructed homogenized monthly time series (1980-2018) for 4,722 meteorological stations. Through examining monthly-averaged wind speeds (MWS), we found that seasonal wind speed range (SWSR; calculated as the difference between maximum and minimum MWS) has declined significantly by 10% sinc...

Better understanding and quantification of river floods for very local and flashy events calls for modeling capability at fine spatial and temporal scales. However, long-term discharge records with a global coverage suitable for extreme events analysis are still lacking. Here, grounded on recent breakthroughs in global runoff hydrology, river model...

Ecological multi-pond constructed wetlands (CWs) are an alternative wastewater treatment technology for nitrogen removal from non-point source pollution. As an important component of nitrogen cycles in the field-scale CWs, microorganisms are affected by design parameters. Nevertheless, the mechanism of design parameters affecting the distribution o...

Plain Language Summary Major rivers flowing from the Himalayan Plateau provide critical water resources for 2 billion people who live downstream and rely on Himalayan rivers for water supply, irrigation, hydropower and in‐stream flows for aquatic habit. While groundwater discharge to rivers is known to contribute to available water resources, how m...

Making a cost-effective governance of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and air pollution is of great importance for megacities to pursue a sustainable future. To achieve this, the present study advocates megacities to implement a two-tier synergic governance system consisting of both synergic governance between GHG and air pollutant emission reductio...

Levoglucosan has been widely used to quantitatively assess biomass burning’s contribution to ambient aerosols, but previous such assessments have not accounted for levoglucosan’s degradation in the atmosphere. We develop the first global simulation of atmospheric levoglucosan, explicitly accounting for its chemical degradation, to evaluate the impa...

Global vegetation photosynthesis and productivity have increased substantially since the 1980s, but this trend is heterogeneous in both time and space. Here, we categorize the secular trend in global vegetation greenness into sustained greening, sustained browning and greening-to-browning. We found that by 2016, increased global vegetation greennes...

Downward shortwave radiation ( R sd ) determines the surface energy balance, alters evapotranspiration and hydrological conditions, and feeds back to the regional and global climate. Large-scale R sd estimates are usually retrieved from satellite based on the top-of-atmosphere radiation and cloud parameters. These estimates are subject to biases an...

Agriculture is expanding in tropical mountainous areas, yet its climatic effect is poorly understood. Here, we investigate how elevation regulates the biophysical climate impacts of deforestation over tropical mountainous areas by integrating satellite-observed forest cover changes into a high-resolution land–atmosphere coupled model. We show that...

The immense reduction in aerosol levels during the COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to reveal how atmospheric chemistry is regulating our climate, among which the effect of aerosols on climate...

Urban areas demonstrate great influence on precipitation, yet the spatial clustering features of precipitation is still unclear over urban areas. This study quantitatively examines the spatial clustering of precipitation intensity in 130 urban-affected regions over mainland China during 2008-2015 using a high-resolution merged precipitation product...

Water resources are of strategic importance for socioeconomic development. Many hydrological models (HMs) and land surface models (LSMs) have been developed for water resources assessment. However, systematic evaluation of discharge simulation from multiple models is still lacking in the Lancang-Mekong River basin. Here, we evaluated the performanc...

Global reanalysis products are important tools across disciplines to study past meteorological changes and are especially useful for wind energy resource evaluations. Studies of observed wind speed show that land surface wind speed declined globally since the 1960s (known as global terrestrial stilling), but reversed with a turning point around 201...

Forests play an important role in the Earth’s system. Understanding the states and changes in global forests is vital for ecological assessments and forest policy guidance. However, there is no consensus on how global forests have changed based on current datasets. In this study, five global land cover datasets and Global Forest Resources Assessmen...

Abstract Sea level rise (SLR) and subsidence are expected to increase the risk of flooding and reliance on flood defenses for cities built on deltas. Here, we combine reliability analysis with hydrodynamic modeling to quantify the effect of projected relative SLR on dike failures and flood hazards for Shanghai, one of the most exposed delta cities....

As a key component of terrestrial water cycle, evapotranspiration (ET), specifically over the Amazon River basin, is of high scientific significance. However, due to the sparse observation network and relatively short observational period of eddy covariance data, large uncertainties remain in the spatial-temporal characteristics of ET over the Amaz...

High-resolution global maps of annual urban land coverage provide fundamental information of global environmental change and contribute to applications related to climate mitigation and urban planning for sustainable development. Here we map global annual urban dynamics from 1985 to 2015 at a 30 m resolution using numerous surface reflectance data...

Plain Language Summary Reactive gaseous nitrogen, sourced to the world's highest fertilizer application rates in China, imparts local cooling effects on short time scales. The effects are ultimately counterbalanced by nitrous oxide emissions over the long term, leading to substantial warming effects on the global climate system. We base our conclus...

Recent progress in remote sensing has snapshotted unprecedented numbers of river planform geometry, providing opportunity to revisit the oversimplified channel shape parameterizations in global hydrologic models. This study leveraged two recent Landsat-derived global river width databases and created a reach-level width dataset to measure the valid...

Plain Language Summary Riverine flooding associated with landfalling tropical cyclones is responsible for some of the most severe socioeconomic losses all around the globe. This is a particularly critical issue for East Asian countries that lie on the margin of western North Pacific, the most active ocean in generating tropical cyclones. In this st...

Earlier vegetation greening under climate change raises evapotranspiration and thus lowers spring soil moisture, yet the extent and magnitude of this water deficit persistence into the following summer remain elusive. We provide observational evidence that increased foliage cover over the Northern Hemisphere, during 1982–2011, triggers an additiona...

Wind power, a rapidly growing alternative energy source, has been threatened by reductions in global average surface wind speed, which have been occurring over land since the 1980s, a phenomenon known as global terrestrial stilling. Here, we use wind data from in situ stations worldwide to show that the stilling reversed around 2010 and that global...