Da Yang
Assistant Professor
Department of Geophysical Sciences and the College
Da Yang’s research interests focus on understanding clouds, rainstorms, and climate change. In recent work, he has asked why individual convective clouds tend to organize together, forming large-scale rainstorms, such as hurricanes; what environmental factors control rainstorms’ spatial scale; and what are essential elements in forecasting rainstorms. He has also discovered that cold air rises in the tropical atmosphere. This discovery led to explorations of the buoyancy effect of water vapor, which is less familiar than thermal buoyancy due to temperature contrasts.
He is a recipient of a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and a Miller Research Fellowship. He also serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Climate. His work has been published in Nature Geoscience, Science Advances, and the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics.
Yang received a BS in physics and atmospheric science from Peking University, and an MS and PhD in environmental science and engineering from the California Institute of Technology. Before joining the University of Chicago, he was on the faculty at the University of California, Davis, and a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.