COAPS - Zhaohua Wu

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Zhaohua Wu

Wu Photo Assistant Professor, Meteorology

Rm. 219A

(850) 645-7463 phone
(850) 644-4841 fax

My primary research interests are atmospheric and climate dynamics, especially in searching for physically and logically consistent theories of the variability and change of the Earth's climate system, ranging from intraseasonal to the Earth's orbital change timescales. The approaches that I am using to achieve research goals include analyzing observational and proxy data, synthesizing and theorizing physical essence of climate phenomena, and using climate system models.

Climate theories, in general, are aiming at understanding and predicting climate normal (mean climate, major climate cycles, etc.), its change, and the variability of anomaly with respect to the normal. The validity of the theories is dependent on the definitions of the normal and its corresponding anomaly. I am particularly interested in searching for the answers to fundamental questions, such as: What is climate normal and what is climate anomaly? In what way can we define climate anomaly that can lead to simpler and more general theories for various climate phenomena? In what perspective can the theories of climate variability and change be more intuitively appealing to our understanding and be more logically consistent?

As data analysis is the starting point for seeking the answers to scientific questions, my research interests also include the development of new data analysis tools that are consistent with fundamental physical constraints such as temporal and spatial locality. Particularly, I make effort to improve a new generation of data analysis methods, the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) that satisfies temporal and spatial locality and its most recent development, the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) - a noise-assisted data analysis (NADA) method. I also search for the mathematical foundations of EMD/EEMD and make novel applications to scientific and engineering fields other than climate research.

Curriculum Vitae (PDF Document)