Research
Research
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Selected Work
Selected Work
Understanding and Preparing for Urban Heatwaves in Singapore and Southeast Asia
Understanding and Preparing for Urban Heatwaves in Singapore and Southeast Asia
ARC 2/24 WJY (MOE-T2EP50124-0018) - Projecting Urban Heatwaves and Building Resilience in Singapore and Southeast Asia
ARC 2/24 WJY (MOE-T2EP50124-0018) - Projecting Urban Heatwaves and Building Resilience in Singapore and Southeast Asia
"This unprecedented heatwave event showed significant impacts on lives, ecosystems, and agriculture. As one of the most important agricultural heartlands with a dense population, accurate heatwave prediction in CSEA is urgent for ensuring food security and safeguarding public health at both local and regional scales. Therefore, further research should be focused on exploring advanced forecast skills, such as deepening the understanding of key drivers and their representation in dynamical models, establishing statistical model based on physical progress analysis, and integrating dynamical models with machine-learning techniques."
"This unprecedented heatwave event showed significant impacts on lives, ecosystems, and agriculture. As one of the most important agricultural heartlands with a dense population, accurate heatwave prediction in CSEA is urgent for ensuring food security and safeguarding public health at both local and regional scales. Therefore, further research should be focused on exploring advanced forecast skills, such as deepening the understanding of key drivers and their representation in dynamical models, establishing statistical model based on physical progress analysis, and integrating dynamical models with machine-learning techniques."
Excerpt from "The characterization, mechanism, predictability, and impacts of the unprecedented 2023 Southeast Asia heatwave", published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.
Project Team
PI: Asst/P Wang Jingyu
Co-PIs: A/P Zhan Shaohua, A/P Wang Xianfeng
Project Collaborators: Prof Greg McFarquhar, Prof Zhi Xiefei, A/P Edward Park
Project Description
Southeast Asia faces rising risks from extreme urban heatwaves, as seen in the record-breaking 2023 event with temperatures reaching 49°C. Cities are especially vulnerable due to the Urban Heat Island effect, which makes them several degrees hotter than surrounding areas. With rapid urban growth, global warming, and an ageing population, the impacts of heatwaves are expected to intensify, straining public health and resilience. This project combines advanced climate modelling and social science research to understand future heatwaves, predict their frequency and intensity, and assess community impacts. The goal is to support better planning and policies that protect people and make cities more resilient in a hotter future. This study integrates climate modelling and social science to assess future urban heatwaves in Southeast Asia and support resilience planning.
Using physics-based and machine learning models, the research team will study urban heatwaves in Southeast Asia from 2025 to 2028. This will be followed by social science research to evaluate how future heatwaves could affect communities, informing resilience planning and policymaking. Findings reveal the characterization, mechanisms, and predictability of the unprecedented 2023 Southeast Asia heatwave, including the circulation patterns most conducive to regional heat extremes. The study also highlights the wide-ranging social and environmental impacts, offering insights for policymakers and urban planners to strengthen resilience strategies.
Beyond academic publications, the project will produce an open-access dataset and interactive visualization platform on Southeast Asia’s urban heatwaves for use by policymakers, educators, and communities. The study also contributes to NIE’s theory–practice nexus by linking scientific modelling with real-world resilience planning.
Project Implications
Provides robust scientific evidence on the mechanisms and predictability of Southeast Asia’s urban heatwaves.
Offers future projections of frequency, intensity, and duration of heatwaves under climate change and urban expansion.
Informs urban planners, policymakers, and public health agencies to design targeted resilience and adaptation strategies.
Supports educators and communities with accessible knowledge and resources to build awareness of heatwave risks.
Contributes to NIE’s theory–practice nexus by integrating advanced climate science with social research for real-world application.
Resources
Selected Talks:
Wang, J., Lyu, Y., Zhi, X., Zhang, H., Lee, J., Park, E., & Tran, D. D. (2025, July). Diagnosis of Heatwaves in Southeast Asia. Paper presented at Asia Oceania Geosciences Society 22nd Annual Meeting, Singapore.
Wang J. (2024, June). The Unprecedented Southeast Asia Heatwave of May 2023. Paper presented at Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS) 2024 Annual Meeting, Pyeongchang, Korea.
Selected Articles:
Lyu, Y., Wang, J., Zhi, X., Zhu, S., Zhang, H., Lee, J., ... & Wang, X. (2025). Revealing the circulation patterns most conducive to regional heatwave in Southeast Asia and the mechanisms behind. Geophysical Research Letters, 52(3), e2024GL112190. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL112190
Lyu, Y., Wang, J., Zhi, X., Wang, X., Zhang, H., Wen, Y., ... & Dung, D. T. (2024). The characterization, mechanism, predictability, and impacts of the unprecedented 2023 Southeast Asia heatwave. npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, 7(1), 246. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-024-00797-w
Satellite-based post-tornado assessments have been widely used for the detection of tornado tracks, which heavily relies on the identification of vegetation changes through observations at visible and near-infrared channels. During the deadly 10–11 December 2021 tornado outbreak, a series of violent tornadoes first touched down over northeastern Arkansas, an area dominated by cropland with rare vegetation coverage in winter. Through the examination of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer multi-spectral observations, this study reveals significant scars on shortwave infrared channels over this region, but none are captured by visible and near-infrared channels. The dominant soil type is aquert (one of vertisols), whose high clay content well preserves the severe changes in soil structure during the tornado passage, when the topmost soil layer was removed and underlying soil with higher moisture content was exposed to the air. This study suggests a quick post-tornado assessment method over less vegetated area by using shortwave infrared channels.
Wang, J., Lin, Y., McFarquhar, G. M., Park, E., Gu, Y., Su, Q., et al. (2023). Soil moisture observations from shortwave infrared channels reveal tornado tracks: A case in 10–11 December 2021 tornado outbreak. Geophysical Research Letters, 50, e2023GL102984. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL102984
Hail and tornadoes are hazardous weather events that are responsible for significant property damage and economic loss world-wide. The most devastating hail and tornado events are commonly produced by supercells in the United States. However, some hazard-producing supercells may grow upscale into mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) or may be 10 embedded in MCSs. Quantifying the relationship of hail and tornado occurrences with MCSs on the long-term climatology is lacking. In this work, the radar features associated with MCSs are extracted from a 14-year MCS tracking database over the contiguous United States, and the hazard reports are matched to the extracted MCS features. We analyze the characteristics of hail and tornadoes associated with MCS characteristics and consider the seasonal and regional variabilities. On average, about 8-17% of hail and 17-32% of tornado events are associated with MCSs depending on various criteria used to define 15 MCSs. The maximum total and MCS-associated hazard events occur in March-May, but the highest MCS-associated portion (23% for hail and 45% for tornado) occurs in winter (December-February) because MCS is the dominant type of convection due to strong synoptic forcing. In contrast to the decreasing trend in the relationship of MCS-associated fraction with hailstone size, the more severe the tornado event is, the more likely it is associated with an MCS. The different trends indicate the distinct mechanisms for the MCS-associated production of the two types of hazards.
Wang, Jingyu & Fan, Jiwen & Feng, Zhe. (2023). Climatological occurrences of hail and tornado associated with mesoscale convective systems in the United States. 10.5194/nhess-2023-16.
The North China Plain (NCP) is globally known for wheat production as well as smoke emission from wheat straw burning after harvest in June. The open straw burning has widespread impacts on climate, biogeochemical cycles, and human well-being through changes in global and regional aerosol concentrations. Although some short-term efforts were successful in suppressing the NCP’s open straw burning in certain years, the Chinese government has been criticized for its ineffective long-term fire management for decades. Triggered by the 2012-2013 winter air pollution crisis, China launched the most stringent legislation to control air pollution. Besides the improvement in air quality, the NCP’s fire carbon emission has been substantially reduced from 4 MtCO2-eq yr-1 in 1997-2016 to 1 MtCO2-eq yr-1 in 2017-2021, while the contemporary global emission from biomass burning has increased by 20 MtCO2-eq yr-1. Noteworthy that this is only one specific type of crop during one harvest season, therefore China’s open straw burning bans may have achieved a much more prodigious triumph in reducing fire carbon emission, which warrants further investigation.
Wang, Jingyu & Wang, Xianfeng. (2023). A triumph of reducing carbon emission by banning open straw burning. 68. 10.1016/j.scib.2022.12.029.
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