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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.

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Courses
  • EIS
    Explorations in Integrated Science

  • EOWH
    Earth: Our Watery Home

  • H
    Hydroclimatology

Grants
  • Funding agency logo
    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
  • Funding agency logo
    Evaluating and Improving the DOE E3SM Land Model

    Co-Investigator (COI)

    2022

    $25.0K
    Active
  • Funding agency logo
    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
  • Funding agency logo
    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
  • Funding agency logo
    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
  • Funding agency logo
    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
  • Funding agency logo
    Lateral Flow Model

    Co-Investigator (COI)

    2020

    $314.2K
  • Funding agency logo
    Improving National Water Model (NWM) Snowmelt Runoff Prediction

    Principal Investigator (PI)

    2018

    $526.4K
  • Funding agency logo
    Collaborative Research: Coupled Hydrological and Geochemical Process Evolution at the Landscape Evolution Observatory

    Co-Investigator (COI)

    2014

    $486.2K
  • Funding agency logo
    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

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