Rui ZHAO

Research Interests:

• Extreme weather characteristics
• Responses of precipitation extremes to anthropogenic climate change
• Aerosol-cloud-precipitation interactions

Recent Research Projects:

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My Ph.D. project is focusing on anthropogenic influences on extreme precipitation events over the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region in South China with the use of a convection-resolving model.

The CMIP5 global models show that the PRD region has warmed by around 0.9 ℃ since the pre-industrial era, resulted from the increasing emission of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. As the climate warms, the atmosphere is expected to hold more moisture in line with the Clausius-Clapeyron (CC) relation, which increases the potential risks of precipitation extremes as a result. Indeed, observational results have corroborated the increasing trend of extreme rain intensity and the enhanced likelihood of such events over the PRD, which threaten our environment and society.

My research aims to quantitatively investigate the extent to which PRD extreme rainfall in different seasons can be attributed to human influences and the underlying physical mechanisms. Attribution results suggest that human activities could have contributed at least a 10% increase in daily extreme precipitation over the inland PRD. In particular, changes of rainfall in MJJAS (i.e. from May to September) are nearly CC scaling of 7% K⁻¹, whereas a super-CC increase of 12.4% K⁻¹ is found for non-MJJAS rainfall. The greater increment of non-MJJAS rainfall highlights the important role of dynamic effect on heavy precipitation, in addition to the moisture-driven thermodynamic effect.