Wen's Research Group – Weather and Climate

About Professor Zhou

Dr. Wen Zhou is Distinguished Professor at Fudan University, serving as the Deputy Director of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Fudan University and Director of the Institute of Ice, Snow, and Climate Change at Polar Research Institute of China. Before joining Fudan in 2022, she was a tenured Professor at City University of Hong Kong. [Curriculum Vitae]

Wen’s research focuses on the monsoon climate of East Asia, tropical intraseasonal oscillations, and the different types of El Niño and their effects on climate. We aim to understand the variability and predictability of the East Asian winter/summer monsoon and to detect and attribute climate variability and climate extremes over the Asia-Pacific region. We also look to advance our understanding of natural hazards such as flood and drought, cold surges and heat waves, and sea level rise and storm surge over the Asia-Pacific region and how these relate with different climate drivers in both present and future scenarios.

Researchgate; Google Scholar; Scopus; ORCID
Contact: wen_zhou@fudan.edu.cn

Recent Highlights

Fudan University Polar Visualization and Forecasting Platform

A visualization-based operational platform built on Version 1.0 of the seamless dynamical forecasting system for the Arctic and Antarctic regions.

The platform provides polar-region forecasts at a spatial resolution of 3-10 km, with forecast lead times ranging from short-term to medium- and long-term scales.

Next Steps: Building an Intelligent Forecasting Platform for Extreme Polar Weather and Environmental Events

Shifting hotspot of tropical cyclone clusters in a warming climate by Zheng-Hang Fu et al. (2025) in Nature Climate Change

Multiple tropical cyclones can be present concurrently within one ocean basin, and these clusters can induce compound hazards within a short time window. While the western North Pacific has historically been home to most tropical cyclone clusters, how climate change might affect this is unclear. Here we use observations and high-resolution climate model simulations to develop a probabilistic model, assuming that tropical cyclones are mutually independent and occur randomly. Against this baseline, we identify outliers as clusters with dynamic interactions between tropical cyclones. We find that the recent global warming pattern induces major shifts in tropical cyclone cluster hotspots from the western North Pacific to the North Atlantic by modulating tropical cyclone frequency and synoptic-scale wave activity. Our probabilistic modelling indicates a tenfold increase in the likelihood of tropical cyclone cluster frequency in the North Atlantic, surpassing that in the western North Pacific, from 1.4 ± 0.4% to 14.3 ± 1.2% over the past 46 years.

Dynamic pathway linking Pakistan flooding to East Asian heatwaves by Zheng-Hang Fu et al. (2024) in Science Advances

Paper cover in Science Advances:

A dry, cracked riverbed near Poyang Lake, China, October 2022. That year, the region suffered a record drought that persisted from July to October. Using observations and a suite of model experiments, Fu et al. showed that the drought was triggered by historic rainfall in Pakistan. Understanding the dynamic pathway linking flooding in Pakistan to East Asian heatwaves and droughts could improve subseasonal predictions of extreme weather events in East Asia.

In this study, we show that two geographically far apart extreme events – floods in Pakistan and heatwaves in East Asia – are linked via atmospheric teleconnections. Pakistan is a “sweet spot” for heavy rainfall there to perturb the westerly jet, leading further to persistent heatwaves in East Asia downstream.

Schematic diagram for the QBO-SST impacting East Asia Summer Precipitation (Fig. 5a in Zhang et al. 2024 Nature Communications)

A stratospheric precursor of East Asian summer droughts and floods by Ruhua Zhang et al. (2024) in Nature Communications

The Asian monsoon is one of the most active monsoon systems in the world, and changes in monsoon precipitation often cause catastrophic weather and climate events including droughts and floods, such as the 2020 Yangtze River floods. Previous studies have explored the causes of droughts and floods in East Asia from the perspectives of ocean-atmosphere, land-atmosphere processes, and dynamics within the troposphere. However, there has been less attention paid to the middle and upper atmosphere. This study suggests a good prospect for using the tropical mid- to upper atmosphere in seasonal forecasts for summer.