Associate Professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering
About
Research Interests:
- Radiative transfer and its applications in both climate modeling and remote sensing
- Diagnostic analysis of satellite observations and climate simulations
- Cloud-radiation-climate interactions
- Radiation budgets and radiative couplings between atmosphere and surface.
Biography:
Being trained at Caltech/JPL for Ph.D. and Princeton/GFDL for the postdoc, Prof. Huang has balanced expertise in space-borne observations and climate modeling. He is specialized in (1) atmospheric radiation and its application in both satellite remote sensing and climate modeling, (2) spectrally resolved measurements and its application in climate studies, (3) cloud-radiation-climate interactions, (4) radiation budgets and radiative couplings between atmosphere and surface.
Prof. Huang regularly teaches atmospheric radiation for upper-division undergraduates and for graduate students. He also teaches climate data analysis, a course tailored for analyzing large spatiotemporal datasets with strong correlational structures.
Professional Service:
- Chair-elect, AMS Atmospheric Radiation Committee
- Editor, Journal of Climate, AMS (since 07/2018)
- Member of AMS Atmospheric Radiation Committee (2018-present)
- Member of AMS Satellite Meteorology, Oceanography, and Climatology Committee (2016-2018)
- Co-Chair of Hyperspectral Imaging and Sounding of Environment Conference 2015 sponsored by Optical Society of American
- Associate Editor, Journal of Climate, AMS (2011-2018)
- Associate Editor, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, AMS (2007-2016)
- Panelist of various programs of NASA Rearth Opportunity in Space and Earth Sciences, 2009, 2010, 2014
- Panelist of DoE Merit Review Panel and Scientific Focus Area Review Panel, 2012, 2015
- Reviewers for leading journals including Nature Geoscience, J. Climate, J. Atmospheric Sciences, etc.
- Conveners and Chairs for AGU Fall meeting and AOGS annual meetings.
Awards:
- Co-Investigator of PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment), an Earth Venture mission by NASA.
- Co-Investigator of FORUM ( The Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring), a phase-A mission study for the ninth Earth Explorer mission by ESA.
- 2015 AOSS Departmental Outstanding Merit Faculty Award
- Recipient of NASA Langley’s 2015 Henry J.E. Reid Award
- Winner of inaugural Amazon Climate Research Grant
- AGU Research Spotlight on our study of the impacts of cloud overlapping assumptions on spectral fingerprinting results.
- Science Definition Team membership for the CLARREO mission, NASA
- Highlight article on Geophysical Research Letters for the research on radiative effect of TTL cirrus on tropospheric-stratospheric transport
- Being the first to demonstrate the superiority of spectral resolved measurements over broadband longwave flux in the GCM evaluation and diagnostics
- Developed and validated the first algorithm to directly estmate the spectral flux over the entire longwave spectrum from the spectrally resolved radiance measurements
- AOS postdoctoral fellowship, Princeton University
Publications:
The full list of peer-reviewed journal publications can be found at here.
Other peer-reviewed publications
- R Goody and X Huang, 2015, Absorption and Thermal Emission. In: Gerald R. North (editor-in-chief), John Pyle and Fuqing Zhang (editors). Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences, 2nd edition, Vol 5, pp. 5–12. ISBN: 9780123822253