Qinghua Ding

Biography

Prof. Ding is a climate scientist who studies the extent to which future climate changes can be predicted on a very broad range of timescales from years to decades, especially in the Arctic and Antarctic. He carries out both diagnostic and modeling studies, using observations and numerical models of the ocean, atmosphere, cryosphere, and their coupled system. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Climate. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii in 2008. His Ph.D. work was to understand Asian monsoon variability over the past 60 years and its linkages with global circulation variability. In 2010, he started to work at the University of Washington as a Research Associate on developing an isotope-enabled global climate model and understanding recent climate change in the Arctic and Antarctic from the perspective of climate dynamics. He found that the recent warming trends in the Arctic and Antarctic are partly attributed to tropical SST-related natural variability. He joined the Polar Science Center in 2014 and accepted a faculty position at UCSB in 2016. The focus of his recent research is on exploring polar-lower latitude connections in the past 100 to 1000 years by using atmosphere-ocean-ice fully coupled GCMs, isotope-enabled GCMs, and paleo-climate proxy data. The ultimate goal is to provide more reliable future projections of polar climate response to anthropogenic climate forcing.

Research

I use isotope-enabled coupled global climate models, instrumental data and paleoclimate proxy data to build knowledge and understand how the global atmospheric circulation and polar climates are interlinked and how they evolve together on interannual, interdecadal, centennial, and millennial time scales as well as in the future, especially due to changing natural forcing and increasing greenhouse gases and ozone change.