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Niu has been an associated professor at the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences (HAS) since 2019 Fall. He has served as the Director of the UA Hydrometeorology Program since 2014. He joined HAS in 2013 Fall as an assistant professor and joined Biosphere 2 as an assistant research professor, The University of Arizona since the fall 2009. He has been working on developing processe-based hydrometeorological and ecohydroligcal models for use in global-scale Earth system models and evaluating the impacts of climate change on ecohydrological processes at catchment scales. He obatined his PhD at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1996. His major research interests are hydrometeorology, ecohydrology, land surface modeling, distributed hydrological modeling, global and regional climate modeling, and application of remote sensing to modeling. He earned the CCSM (Community Climate System Model) distinguished achievement award by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in 2008 for his work on developing a novel surface water and groundwater model for use in CCSM and "Xuedu Fengzheng" best dissertation award by CAS in 1996.Show Less
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Courses
- EISExplorations in Integrated Science
- EOWHEarth: Our Watery Home
- HHydroclimatology
Grants
- Advance Land Surface Modeling Coupled with the NextGen NWM and Integrate with NOAA UFS to Improve Hydrologic Forecasting Capability
Co-Investigator (COI)
2022
$241.2K
Active - Evaluating and Improving the DOE E3SM Land Model
Co-Investigator (COI)
2022
$25.0K
Active - Collaborative Research: GCR: Growing a New Science of Landscape Terraformation: The Convergence of Rock, Fluids, and Life to form Complex Ecosystems Across Scales
Co-Investigator (COI)
2021
$1.2M
Active - Improved Understanding of the Coupled Dynamics of Terrestrial Water, Ecosystems, and Climate Over the Contiguous United States Using Nu-Wrf/Noah-MP
Principal Investigator (PI)
2021
$62.9K
Active - Developing an Irrigation Dataset for Assessment of Anthropogenic Impacts on Terrestrial-Atmosphere Energy-Water Coupling Using Machine Learning-Based Data Fusion
Principal Investigator (PI)
2020
$75.2K
Active - Improved Understanding of the Coupled Dynamics of Terrestrial Water, Ecosystems, and Climate Over the Contiguous United States Using NU-WRF/Noah-MP
Principal Investigator (PI)
2017
$460.5K
Active - Lateral Flow Model
Co-Investigator (COI)
2020
$314.2K
- Improving National Water Model (NWM) Snowmelt Runoff Prediction
Principal Investigator (PI)
2018
$526.4K
- Collaborative Research: Coupled Hydrological and Geochemical Process Evolution at the Landscape Evolution Observatory
Co-Investigator (COI)
2014
$486.2K
- Acquisition of an Instrumentation Array to Monitor and Model Water, Carbon and Energy Fluxes at the Hillslope Scale in the Landscape Evolution....
Co-Investigator (COI)
2014
$188.2K
News
- UA Awarded $2.95M to Study Monsoon Ecology
2011
Publications (101)
Recent
- The Compensatory CO2 Fertilization and Stomatal Closure Effects on Runoff Projection From 2016–2099 in the Western United States
2022
- A Microbial-Explicit Soil Organic Carbon Decomposition Model (MESDM): Development and Testing at a Semiarid Grassland Site
2022
- Physics-Based Narrowband Optical Parameters for Snow Albedo Simulation in Climate Models
2022
- Exploring the Potential of Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs) for Improving Understanding of Continental- and Regional-Scale Snow Dynamics
2021
- Effects of Irrigation on Seasonal and Annual Temperature and Precipitation over China Simulated by the WRF Model
2021
- Coupling surface flow with high-performance subsurface reactive flow and transport code PFLOTRAN
2021
- Drought adaptability of phreatophytes: Insight from vertical root distribution in drylands of China
2021
- Reactive transport modeling of basalt weathering and early soil formation within a highly-controlled, sloping lysimeter.
2021
- Improved Runoff Simulations for a Highly Varying Soil Depth and Complex Terrain Watershed in the Loess Plateau with the Community Land Model
2021
- Massive crop expansion threatens agriculture and water sustainability in Northwestern China
2021
- Annual variations of T/ET in a semi-arid region: Implications of plant water use strategies
2021
- An improved practical approach for estimating catchment-scale response functions through wavelet analysis
2020
- Ubiquitous Fractal Scaling and Filtering Behavior of Hydrologic Fluxes and Storages from A Mountain Headwater Catchment
2020
- Why Is the Terrestrial Water Storage in Dryland Regions Declining? A Perspective Based on Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Satellite Observations and Noah Land Surface Model With Multiparameterization Schemes Model Simulations
2020
- Interactions between snow cover and evaporation lead to higher sensitivity of streamflow to temperature
2020
- Highly sampled measurements in a controlled atmosphere at the Biosphere 2 Landscape Evolution Observatory
2020
- Metadata record for: Highly sampled measurements in a controlled atmosphere at the Biosphere 2 Landscape Evolution Observatory
2020
- High-resolution simulations of mean and extreme precipitation with WRF for the soil-erosive Loess Plateau
2020
- Enhancing the Noah‐MP Ecosystem Response to Droughts With an Explicit Representation of Plant Water Storage Supplied by Dynamic Root Water Uptake
2020
- Vegetation source water identification using isotopic and hydrometric observations from a subhumid mountain catchment
2020
- Bayesian inference and predictive performance of soil respiration models in the presence of model discrepancy
2019
- Parameter Sensitivity Analysis for Computationally Intensive Spatially Distributed Dynamical Environmental Systems Models
2019
- Climatic forcing for recent significant terrestrial drying and wetting
2019
- An improved vegetation emissivity scheme for land surface modeling and its impact on snow cover simulations
2019
- Hydrologic functioning of the deep critical zone and contributions to streamflow in a high-elevation catchment: Testing of multiple conceptual models
2019
- A Wet‐Bulb Temperature‐Based Rain‐Snow Partitioning Scheme Improves Snowpack Prediction Over the Drier Western United States
2019
- Implementing Dynamic Root Optimization in Noah-MP for Simulating Phreatophytic Root Water Uptake
2018
- Controlled Experiments of Hillslope Coevolution at the Biosphere 2 Landscape Evolution Observatory: Toward Prediction of Coupled Hydrological, Biogeochemical, and Ecological Change
2018
- Assessment of the effects of climate change on evapotranspiration with an improved elasticity method in a Nonhumid Area
2018
- Relative model score: a scoring rule for evaluating ensemble simulations with application to microbial soil respiration modeling
2018
- Which way do you lean? Using slope aspect variations to understand Critical Zone processes and feedbacks
2018
- Quantifying the Impact of Climate Change and Human Activities on Streamflow in a Semi-Arid Watershed with the Budyko Equation Incorporating Dynamic Vegetation Information
2018
- Effects of differential hillslope-scale water retention characteristics on rainfall–runoff response at the Landscape Evolution Observatory
2018
- Why Do Large-Scale Land Surface Models Produce a Low Ratio of Transpiration to Evapotranspiration?
2018
- A Systematic Evaluation of Noah-MP in Simulating Land-Atmosphere Energy, Water, and Carbon Exchanges Over the Continental United States
2017
- Study of the spatiotemporal characteristics of meltwater contribution to the total runoffin the Upper Changjiang River Basin
2017
- Improving the Xin'anjiang hydrological model based on mass-energy balance
2017
- Testing the hybrid-3-D hillslope hydrological model in a controlled environment
2016
- Evaporation variability of Nam Co Lake in the Tibetan Plateau and its role in recent rapid lake expansion
2016
- A gridded global data set of soil, intact regolith, and sedimentary deposit thicknesses for regional and global land surface modeling
2016
- Implementing and evaluating variable soil thickness in the Community Land Model, version 4.5 (CLM4.5)
2016
- Global 1-km Gridded Thickness of Soil, Regolith, and Sedimentary Deposit Layers
2016
- Multiresponse modeling of variably saturated flow and isotope tracer transport for a hillslope experiment at the Landscape Evolution Observatory
2016
- The effect of groundwater interaction in North American regional climate simulations with WRF/Noah-MP
2015
- Critical Zone Services: Expanding Context, Constraints, and Currency beyond Ecosystem Services
2015
- A hybrid-3D hillslope hydrological model for use in Earth system models
2015
- The Landscape Evolution Observatory: A large-scale controllable infrastructure to study coupled Earth-surface processes
2015
- A piecewise modeling approach for climate sensitivity studies: Tests with a shallow-water model
2015
- Impact of sensor failure on the observability of flow dynamics at the Biosphere 2 LEO hillslopes
2015
- Incipient subsurface heterogeneity and its effect on overland flow generation - Insight from a modeling study of the first experiment at the Biosphere 2 Landscape Evolution Observatory
2014
- Evaluating the effect of rainfall variability on vegetation establishment in a semidesert grassland
2014
- Modeling seasonal snowpack evolution in the complex terrain and forested colorado headwaters region: A model intercomparison study
2014
- Hydrological evaluation of the noah-MP land surface model for the Mississippi River Basin
2014
- Assessing five evolving microbial enzyme models against field measurements from a semiarid savannah - What are the mechanisms of soil respiration pulses?
2014
- An integrated modelling framework of catchment- scale ecohydrological processes: 2. The role of water subsidy by overland flow on vegetation dynamics in a semi- arid catchment
2014
- An integrated modelling framework of catchment-scale ecohydrological processes: 1. Model description and tests over an energy-limited watershed
2014
- Development of a China Dataset of Soil Hydraulic Parameters Using Pedotransfer Functions for Land Surface Modeling
2013
- Parameter estimation in ensemble based snow data assimilation: A synthetic study
2011
- The community Noah land surface model with multiparameterization options (Noah-MP): 2. Evaluation over global river basins
2011
- River Network Routing on the NHDPlus Dataset
2011
- Modeling spatial and temporal variations in soil moisture in China
2011
- The community Noah land surface model with multiparameterization options (Noah-MP): 1. Model description and evaluation with local-scale measurements
2011
- Ensemble evaluation of hydrologically enhanced Noah-LSM: Partitioning of the water balance in high-resolution simulations over the little washita river experimental watershed
2011
- Quantifying parameter sensitivity, interaction, and transferability in hydrologically enhanced versions of the Noah land surface model over transition zones during the warm season
2010
- Multisensor snow data assimilation at the continental scale: The value of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment terrestrial water storage information
2010
- Impacts of vegetation and groundwater dynamics on warm season precipitation over the Central United States
2009
- Development of a large-scale hydrological model TOPX and its coupling with regional integrated environment modeling system RIEMS
2009
- 2005 drought event in the Amazon River basin as measured by GRACE and estimated by climate models
2009
- Evaluating enhanced hydrological representations in Noah LSM over transition zones: Implications for model development
2009
- Spatial statistical properties and scale transform analyses on the topographic index derived from DEMs in China
2009
- Stable water isotope simulation in different reservoirs of Manaus, Brazil, by Community Land Model incorporating stable isotopic effect
2009
- Simulations of seasonal variations of stable water isotopes in land surface process model CLM
2009
- Improvements to the community land model and their impact on the hydrological cycle
2008
- Enhancing the estimation of continental-scale snow water equivalent by assimilating MODIS snow cover with the ensemble Kalman filter
2008
- Model performance, model robustness, and model fitness scores: A new method for identifying good land-surface models
2008
- Use of FLUXNEt in the community land model development
2008
- Sensitivity of biogenic emissions simulated by a land-surface model to land-cover representations
2008
- Future precipitation changes and their implications for tropical peatlands
2007
- An observation-based formulation of snow cover fraction and its evaluation over large North American river basins
2007
- Improving land-surface model hydrology: Is an explicit aquifer model better than a deeper soil profile?
2007
- Development of a simple groundwater model for use in climate models and evaluation with Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment data
2007
- Retrieving snow mass from GRACE terrestrial water storage change with a land surface model
2007
- Interannual variation in biogenic emissions on a regional scale
2007
- Assessing a land surface model's improvements with GRACE estimates
2006
- Effects of frozen soil on snowmelt runoff and soil water storage at a continental scale
2006
- A simple TOPMODEL-based runoff parameterization (SIMTOP) for use in global climate models
2005
- Modeling the continental hydrology: The interplay between canopy interception and hill-slope runoff
2004
- Impacts of Fractional Snow Cover on Surface Air Temperature in the NCAR Community Atmosphere Model (NCAR-CAM2)
2004
- Effects of vegetation canopy processes on snow surface energy and mass balances
2004
- The Rhone-aggregation land surface scheme intercomparison project: An overview
2004
- The Common Land Model
2003
- Simulation of high-latitude hydrological processes in the Torne-Kalix basin: PILPS phase 2(e) - 1: Experiment description and summary intercomparisons
2003
- The impact of sea surface temperature on the North American monsoon: A GCM study
2003
- The versatile integrator of surface atmospheric processes part 2: Evaluation of three topography-based runoff schemes
2003
- Simulation of high latitude hydrological processes in the Torne-Kalix basin: PILPS phase 2(e) - 2: Comparison of model results with observations
2003
- The versatile integrator of surface and atmosphere processes - Part 1. Model description
2003
- The flood of November 1994 in Piedmont, Italy: A quantitative analysis and simulation
2002
- Snow-climate interaction in NCAR CCM3
2000
- Simulation of snow mass and extent in general circulation models
1999
- Numerical simulation on the response of land surface to severe weather
1998
- Water and heat transport in the desert soil and atmospheric boundary layer in western China
1997