Dr. Jing Sun is a hydroclimate scientist whose research advances understanding of climate dynamics and land-atmosphere interactions. Her work elucidates how external forcing and internal feedbacks influence the Tibetan Plateau climate system, improves soil moisture simulations and related feedbacks through developing novel parameterizations of soil organic matter effects, and identifies global pathways of soil moisture-precipitation coupling, offering new metrics for evaluating climate models. She has published 17 peer-reviewed papers, including first-author articles in leading journals such as Nature Communications, Remote Sensing of Environment, and Journal of Climate (one ESI Highly Cited Paper).
Dr. Sun is currently a Research Fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the National University of Singapore. She received her bachelor’s degree in Atmospheric Science from Nanjing University (2018) and her Ph.D. in Ecology from Tsinghua University (2023), where she subsequently served as a Shuimu Scholar, the highest postdoc honor at Tsinghua University.
The Tibetan Plateau (TP), known as the “Asian Water Tower”, plays a pivotal role in regional and global climate by regulating monsoon dynamics and water resources. Its complex topography, high sensitivity to climate change, and unique land-surface characteristics make it an ideal region for investigating how external forcings interact with land-atmosphere processes to shape hydroclimatic variability. This presentation explores key mechanisms behind recent hydroclimatic changes over the TP, focusing on two central questions: (1) Which external drivers contribute to the pronounced wetting of the TP in recent decades, and through which atmospheric pathways do they operate? (2) How do internal land-surface processes-such as soil properties and surface energy partitioning—modulate or feedback onto regional hydroclimate? Our findings highlight the role of Atlantic sea surface temperature anomalies and increased evaporation in the plateau hydroclimatic change.
Extending beyond the TP, land–atmosphere feedback, especially soil moisture–precipitation coupling, significantly influence global climate predictability, hydrological extremes, and water resource distribution. However, the underlying mechanisms and spatial patterns of this feedback remain poorly understood. Thus, we also examine the physical pathways linking soil moisture to precipitation and assess the spatial coherence and climate dependence of these coupling regimes. These process-level insights are then used to evaluate the performance of current climate models in representing land–atmosphere feedback.
These advances are essential for enhancing understanding of hydroclimatic variability across scales, strengthening the scientific basis for climate model evaluation and development, and improving society’s ability to anticipate and respond to future climate change.