Shang-Ping Xie received his B.Sc. degree from the Ocean University of China, and Ph.D. in physical oceanography in 1991 from Tohoku University, Japan. He is the distinguished professor of climate science and the inaugural Roger Revelle Chair in environmental science at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD. He was a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, which was published in 2014. Dr. Xie received the Meteorological Society of Japan Medal (the highest honor of the Society) in 2002, the National Science Foundation Special Creativity Award in 2013, and the Sverdrup Gold Medal in 2017 for “fundamental contributions to understanding the coupled ocean-atmosphere feedback processes involved in climate variability and climate change.” He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and American Meteorological Society (AMS), and a Highly Cited Researcher on the Web of Science (among 140 worldwide in geoscience).

Dr. Xie’s research centers on ocean-atmosphere interactions and their role in climate formation, variability, and change. His research contributes to answering such fundamental questions as what determines the spatio-temporal variations of climate, how preferred patterns of climate variability form, how predictable climate is, and how climate will change in the face of increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Dr. Xie carries out both diagnostic and modeling studies, using observations and numerical models of the ocean, atmosphere, and their coupled system. Geographically, his work covers all three major oceans of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian, and monsoons of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. His research has led to the formulation of wind-evaporation-sea surface temperature (WES) feedback mechanism and the Indian Ocean capacitor effect, the “warmer-get-wetter” idea for rainfall change in global warming, and the discovery of what Science magazine called the longest island wake of the world.

(Updated February 2021)