Wei-Ting Hsiao

Change in the large-scale climate states cause the change in the statistics of small-scale weather, such as the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall and strong wind events -- this one-way influence of climate on weather is commonly discussed due to the great socioeconomical impact. On the other hand, it could also be interpreted as that the changing behaviour of small-scale weather establishes the change in large-scale climate, and understanding the statiscial drift of these transient events seems necessary to understand long-term climate projection. Such two-way interaction is my general research interest, espacially on how small-scale processes have upscale influence on large-scale climate, which is not intuitively clear in many cases.

The "Weather-Climate Interaction Group" I led focuses on how tropical deep convection and stratocumulus interacts with the Pacific Walker Circulation under climate change. The Pacific Walker Circulation (PWC) strongly couples with troipcal sea surface temperature and global circulation patterns, and thus is tied to the sensitivity of the Earth's climate to external forcing. Understanding the driver of PWC trend under climate change is essential, while global climate models struggle to capture the realistic dynamics of the PWC. Using storm-resolving, km-scale ICON simulations, we are currently curious about what the explicit representation of weather-scale processes could tell us about how long-term PWC change is established, comparing to real-world observations.