Zhanqing Li is a Chinese-American atmospheric and environmental scientist, serving as a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. Li's work has been focused in atmospheric and environmental sciences, climate, remote sensing He has been ranked among the world's top 0.1% most cited scientists. Li is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Meteorological Society.
Education and career Born in Luoyang, Henan, China, Li received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST) in 1983 and 1986, respectively, and earned his Ph.D. from McGill University, Canada, in 1991. His career began at the China Meteorological Administration, where he worked as a junior researcher for one year. After receiving his Ph.D., he conducted postdoctoral research at the Meteorological Service of Canada (1991–1992), and was then hired as a research scientist at the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing for 9 years. In 2001, he joined the University of Maryland, College Park, as a full professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and he has been a Distinguished University Professor since 2022. He has also held editorial roles with journals including the Journal of Geophysical Research and Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
Research Li's research is concerned with earth's radiation budget, aerosol, cloud, aerosol-cloud-interactions, aerosol-radiation-interactions, air pollution and impact on severe weather and climate change, planetary boundary layers, biomass burning, and their impacts on public health. He has developed original remote sensing algorithms and products of atmospheric and environmental variables. He has published in journals including Nature, Science, and The Lancet. He received the Canadian Government's Head of Public Service Award in 1998, the 2014 Yoram J. Kaufman Research Award from the American Geophysical Union, and the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2015. Li's work has encompassed research and discoveries across atmospheric, environmental, terrestrial sciences, and public health disciplines with main foci in the Earth's radiation budget, aerosol impacts on clouds and precipitation, satellite algorithm and product development, climate-environment interactions, fire monitoring systems, and extensive aerosol, climate, and environmental studies. Li has fostered partnerships between the US and Canada, which supported the CloudSat mission, and between the US and China, leading the NASA's EAST-AIRE project and DOE's ARM/AMF field experiment in China. He has been engaged in US and international research programs like ARM (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement), ERBE (Earth Radiation Budget Experiment), SRB (Surface Radiation Budget), GACP (Global Aerosol Climatology Project), and LCLUC (Land Cover and Land Use Change). He led the project FIRE-M3 (Fire Monitoring, Mapping and Modeling) in Canada. He has also served on the science teams of France's ScaRaB and EU's Fire initiatives.
Solar radiation budget analysis through satellite algorithms Li has studied the Earth's solar radiation budget (SRB), the driving force of the climate system, and developed satellite-based algorithms to retrieve global SRB. His parameterized SRB algorithm has been employed in NASA's ERBE and CERES satellite programs to generate global SRB datasets. Li has estimated the global solar energy distribution from satellite with 25–30% systematic changes in the solar radiation disposition relative to previous estimates, reducing surface absorption and increasing atmospheric absorption. He has helped identify and resolved model deficiencies concerning model treatments of water vapor absorption, surface albedo, and aerosol absorption, addressed debates on cloud absorption anomalies and provided insights into solar radiative processes and their representation in climate models.
The cloud absorption anomaly Li's research challenged the once-growing acceptance of the cloud absorption anomaly (CAA), a historical paradox dated to 1957 through 1990s suggesting clouds absorb more solar radiation than theoretical calculations. Using global satellite and ground-based observations alongside model simulations, he found that the amount of solar radiation absorbed by clouds generally aligned with model estimates, with the exception in some tropical regions. This conclusion was further supported by a detailed study and the development of a new analysis method. The enhanced absorption observed in the tropics was later linked to smoke from tropical burning. To address the CAA, the U.S. Department of Energy's ARM program sponsored a field campaign in the southern Great Plains in 1995, with initial findings supporting CAA based on aircraft measurements, but Li identified inconsistencies between the aircraft data and observations from other platforms, prompting another field campaign in 2000. Following this experiment, no significant CAA was found, although some model underestimation remained, which was attributed to surface albedo effects rather than clouds, prompting more efforts to document albedo changes. Li and his team further attributed the claimed cloud absorption anomaly to artifacts due to deficiencies in observation, analysis methods and dated radiative transfer models, while he discovered the real causes of the CAA to lack and/or inadequate treatments of aerosol and water vapor absorption, as reported in his publications in Nature and Science.
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