Paper Authored by Prof. Mengqian Lu and PhD Students Now Front-Page Feature in Nature Partner Journal

A paper written by Prof. Mengqian LU, Assistant Professor of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and her PhD students DAI Lun and CHENG Tat Fan, has been featured on the front page of the prestigious journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science. The journal is part of the Nature Partner Journals Series under Springer Nature.

The paper, entitled “Anthropogenic warming disrupts intraseasonal monsoon stages and brings dry-get-wetter climate in future East Asia”, highlights Prof. Lu and her team’s research on how changes in monsoon cycle affect climates in East Asia. The research particularly shows how, under a skewed monsoon cycle, the entire East Asia will experience up to 14–20 more heavy precipitation days during the rainy spring to mid-summer stages. The geography-specific findings of the research include: the Yangtze basin will suffer from an earlier pluvial period with significantly heightened flood risks, and societal security and ecosystem resilience in the Huai-Yellow basin, across southern Japan, and over the Korean Peninsula will be severely tested by frequent weather whiplashes. The research team further proposes a framework for assessing future monsoon cycles, thereby filling a gap in knowledge regarding the projected changes to East Asia’s intra-seasonal monsoon stages.

The academic journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science is dedicated to publishing high-quality papers on such topics as the dynamics, variabilities and prediction of weather and climate, climate change, air pollution, atmospheric chemistry, the hydrological cycle, as well as atmosphere-ocean and atmosphere-land interactions. The above paper is available online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-022-00235-9.