International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, IEAS

Academician

Xubin ZENG

Profile:

Elected Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences in 2010, Professor Xubin Zeng is a distinguished Chinese-American atmospheric scientist whose research and professional work have focused on land–atmosphere–ocean interactions, weather and climate modelling, hydrometeorology, remote sensing, and nonlinear dynamics. Born in 1963, he received his B.S. in atmospheric physics from Nanjing University in 1984, his M.S. in meteorology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1987, and his Ph.D. in atmospheric science from Colorado State University in 1992. Following postdoctoral research with the UCAR Climate System Modelling Project, he joined the University of Arizona in 1994 and subsequently served as Professor and Agnese N. Haury Chair in Environment. He is currently Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Founding Director of the Climate Dynamics and Hydrometeorology Collaborative at the University of Arizona. He is also affiliated with interdisciplinary programmes in applied mathematics, global change, and remote sensing and spatial analysis. A Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Geophysical Union, he has received the National Science Foundation Special Creativity Award, the Charles Franklin Brooks Award, and the Bert Bolin Award and Lecture of the American Geophysical Union. He has served in leadership and advisory roles for the World Climate Research Programme, the US Department of Energy, NASA, NOAA, and the US National Academies, contributing to international research coordination in atmospheric and Earth system sciences.

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Professor Zeng’s research has centred on the exchanges of energy, water, and momentum among the land, atmosphere, and ocean that influence weather and climate. His work on land-surface processes and model parameterisation has contributed to the development of widely used representations of soil moisture, snow, evapotranspiration, and other hydrometeorological variables in weather and climate models. He has also developed observation-based datasets integrating in situ measurements, satellite remote sensing, and modelling, helping to strengthen links between observation and simulation in Earth system research. His research spans land–atmosphere interactions, nonlinear atmospheric dynamics, remote sensing of hydrometeorological variables, and more recently the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to environmental data analysis. He co-founded a hydrometeorology graduate programme in the United States and has contributed to major international research initiatives, including the Global Precipitation Experiment and the Global Energy and Water Exchanges project of the World Climate Research Programme. He has published more than 290 peer-reviewed papers and has served as a visiting or advisory scientist for major atmospheric and Earth science institutions. Through sustained interdisciplinary research and international scientific collaboration, Professor Zeng has contributed to advances in hydrometeorology, observation–model integration, precipitation prediction, and understanding of the coupled Earth system.