Da YangAssistant Professor

Research Focus:

Convection, clouds, atmospheric dynamics, and climate change

Email:

dayang@uchicago.edu

Biography

• Miller Research Fellow, UC Berkeley (2014 - 2017)
• Ph.D., Caltech (2008 - 2014)
• B.S., Peking University (2004 - 2008)

Research Interests

Da Yang’s research interests focus on understanding clouds, rainstorms, and climate change. In recent work, he asked why individual convective clouds tend to organize together, forming large-scale rainstorms; what environmental factors control rainstorms’ spatial scale; and what are essential elements in forecasting rainstorms. He has also discovered that cold air rises in the tropical free troposphere (not near the surface). This discovery has led to explorations of the buoyancy effect of water vapor, which is less familiar than thermal buoyancy due to temperature contrasts.

Selected Publications

Yang, D., and co-authors, 2022: Substantial influence of vapor buoyancy on tropospheric air temperature and subtropical cloud. Nature Geoscience. doi: 10.1038/s41561-022-01033-x

Yang, D., 2021: A Shallow Water Model for Convective Self-Aggregation. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. doi: 10.1175/JAS-D-20-0031.1

Yang, D. and S. Seidel, 2020: The Incredible Lightness of Water Vapor.  Journal of Climate. doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-19-0260.1

Yang, D., 2018: Boundary layer diabatic processes, the virtual effect, and convective self‐aggregation. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 10, 2163 - 2176. doi: 10.1029/2017MS001261

A full list of publications can be found here.

Honors

2021 NSF CAREER award

2019 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering

2014 Miller Research Fellowship