WELCOME!

We are a group of “climate-minded” oceanographers who investigate how the ocean works and how the ocean is affected by and responds to the ever-changing climate. More specifically, we are interested in 1) physical changes and variability in the global ocean; 2) exchange of the upper and deep layers of the global ocean; 3) roles of mesoscale eddies in connecting different parts and layers of the global ocean. If you are interested in our research or have any questions, please reach us at xfliang at udel.edu.

Group News

 

2025

July

Excited to share a new paper entitled “Investigating the Temporal Sensitivity of Upper Ocean Salinity to Global Water Cycle Changes With Unsupervised Learning” in GRL. In this paper, we used machine learning to determine when and where ocean salinity serves as a “rain gauge” for the global water cycle. We found that on monthly timescales, freshwater flux is the dominant driver of salinity changes in 11% of the ocean and a major influence in another 35%. However, this relationship weakens over longer timescales, except in the polar regions. The paper is publicly available here:  https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2025GL115550

June

Congratulations to Dr. Yang Zhang for starting his postdoc position at Scripps!

April

Great news! Maya Feinstein was admitted to the PhD program in Oceanography at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. Congratulations, Maya!

March

Congratulations to Yang Zhang on the publication of his second paper in JGR-Oceans, titled “Assessing Deep and Abyssal Ocean Heat Content Changes With a Dynamically Consistent Ocean State Estimate.” In this study, we conducted a sampling experiment using ECCO v4 to investigate whether the undersampling of historical hydrographic measurements contributes to the differing trends in deep ocean heat content observed in studies based on observations versus those based on ECCO data. The results indicate that undersampling is unlikely to be the cause of these contrasting trends. You can find the paper here.  https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2024JC020925

Congratulations to Yang Zhang for successfully defending his PhD dissertation “Understanding Deep Ocean State Changes with an Ocean State Estimate and Observations.”

2024

November

Our recent paper, “Salty Drift” of Argo Floats Affects the Gridded Ocean Salinity Products, was selected for featuring as an Editor’s Highlight and has just been published on AGU’s EOS https://eos.org/editor-highlights/are-rogue-argo-floats-skewing-ocean-salinity-data-products

Congratulations to Dr. Minghai Huang for starting his postdoc position at TAMU! He will be working on some exciting new science with the newly available SWOT data.

September

A new paper, “Salty Drift” of Argo Floats Affects the Gridded Ocean Salinity Products, was recently published in JGR-Oceans. In this paper, we identified the impacts of drifting Argo salinity measurements after 2015 on several widely used gridded ocean data products: an unrealistic global ocean salinification after 2015; and increased disagreements between those products after 2015. The paper can be openly accessed here: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2023JC020871

May

Minghai was hooded as a PhD during the university ceremony! Congratulations to Dr. Minghai Huang!

2023

August

Congratulations to Minghai Huang for publishing his second paper this year in GRL. This paper is entitled “ENSO Modulates Mean Currents and Mesoscale Eddies in the Caribbean Sea” and can be accessed here: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2023GL103958 

Congratulations to Dr. Chao Liu for starting his Postdoc Position at WHOI!

July

Another paper led by Yingli Zhu, Near-inertial oscillations in the deep Gulf of Mexico, was published in Deep-Sea Research Part II. In this paper, we collected and analyzed a large set of mooring measurements in the deep part of the GoM to describe and understand the NIO. Among many other findings, we found intense bottom-layer NIOs in the northern GoM and they are related to the low-frequency currents, likely through flow-topography interaction. The full paper can be found here https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1hS1X3Ruf1NaiV until Sep. 8, and a preprint can be found here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372142878_Near-inertial_oscillations_in_the_deep_Gulf_of_Mexico 

January

One paper led by graduate student Minghai Huang was published in the Journal of Physical Oceanography.  In this paper, we described the seasonal variability of eddies in the Northwestern Tropical Atlantic Ocean and explored the underlying mechanisms using a novel analysis method. This paper can be found here: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/phoc/aop/JPO-D-22-0200.1/JPO-D-22-0200.1.xml

2022

December

One paper led by Yingli Zhu was published in Frontiers in Marine Science. In this paper, we describe the spatial and temporal characteristics of the Eulerian mesoscale eddies in the Gulf of Mexico based on multi-decade satellite data. The paper can be found here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2022.1087060/full

May

I gave a department seminar talk at UD to review the activities of our group over the past few years. A recording of the talk can be found here https://capture.udel.edu/media/SMSP+Spring+2022+Colloquia+Speaker+Series+-+Dr.+Xinfeng+Liang/1_6g3ml806/187881983