Jianhao Zhang
Research Scientist | CIRES at University of Colorado Boulder & NOAA CSL
David Skaggs Research Center
325 Broadway
Boulder, CO, USA
Clouds have fascinated humanity for millennia with their everchanging shapes, colors, and textures. Beyond their beauty, clouds are fundamental to Earth’s climate system, shaping both the hydrological cycle through precipitation and the global energy balance through their reflective (cooling) and heat-trapping (warming) properties. The processes governing cloud behavior span an extraordinary range of scales—from microscopic droplet formation to the evolution of weather systems hundreds of kilometers across—making clouds one of the least constrained components in predicting weather and climate.
My research characterizes and quantifies how clouds respond to changes in their environment, including variations in aerosol loading and meteorological conditions arising from human activities and natural climate variability. Building on this, I seek to understand how these cloud responses shape the increasing Earth’s energy imbalance and constrain the viability and risks of proposed climate interventions. To address these multiscale questions, I leverage satellite and field observations, atmospheric and Earth system modeling, and data-driven approaches to extract physical understanding of the processes linking clouds to a changing climate.
Research Themes
Click a theme to see the projects it covers.
News
| Jun 03, 2026 | New Scientist Magazine, CIRES News, and Phys.org cover our Nature paper on the newly identified Earth’s East-West albedo symmetry.  |
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| Jun 03, 2026 | Our new study “Earth’s East-West Albedo Symmetry” is published in Nature  |
| May 20, 2026 | I gave an invited seminar (virtually) at the Libera STM, Berkeley CA, on “Earth’s East-West Albedo Symmetry”  |
| May 07, 2026 | I was promoted to Research Scientist III at CIRES CU Boulder and NOAA CSL.  |
| Mar 25, 2026 | UC Berkeley Physics-major Daisy Kerr will join our group for summer 2026 to work with me on building an emulator for Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) based on our ensemble LES simulations. |
Selected Publications
- J. Zhang, J. J. Gristey, and G. Feingold (2026): Earth’s East-West albedo symmetry. Nature, 654, 676-682. doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10624-2
- G. Feingold, F. Glassmeier, J. Zhang, and F. Hoffmann (2025): Opinion: Inferring process from snapshots of cloud systems. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 25(18), 10869–10885. doi:10.5194/acp-25-10869-2025
- J. Zhang, Y.-S. Chen, E. Gryspeerdt, T. Yamaguchi, and G. Feingold (2025): Radiative forcing from the 2020 shipping fuel regulation is large but hard to detect. Commun. Earth Environ., 6(18), 1–11. doi:10.1038/s43247-024-01911-9
- G. Feingold, V. Ghate, L. Russell, et al. including J. Zhang (2024): Physical science research needed to evaluate the viability and risks of marine cloud brightening. Sci. Adv., 10(12), eadi8594. doi:10.1126/sciadv.adi8594
- J. Zhang, Y.-S. Chen, T. Yamaguchi, and G. Feingold (2024): Cloud water adjustments to aerosol perturbations are buffered by solar heating in non-precipitating marine stratocumuli. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 24(18), 10425–10440. doi:10.5194/acp-24-10425-2024
- J. Zhang and G. Feingold (2023): Distinct regional meteorological influences on low-cloud albedo susceptibility over global marine stratocumulus regions. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 23(2), 1073–1090. doi:10.5194/acp-23-1073-2023
- J. Zhang, X. Zhou, T. Goren, and G. Feingold (2022): Albedo susceptibility of northeastern Pacific stratocumulus: the role of covarying meteorological conditions. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 22(2), 861–880. doi:10.5194/acp-22-861-2022
- J. Zhang and P. Zuidema (2021): Sunlight-absorbing aerosol amplifies the seasonal cycle in low-cloud fraction over the southeast Atlantic. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 21(14), 11179–11199. doi:10.5194/acp-21-11179-2021