Project Experience and Statement of Purpose

My experiences in water science date back to nine years ago. At age 16, I attended Tsinghua University, majoring hydraulic engineering. After I got the bachelor degree, I was recommended for admission to the Institute of Hydrology and Water Resources (IHWR), Tsinghua University for a master course because of my excellency in water science. After got the master degree, I was then recommended for admission to the laboratory for Hydrology and Water Resources Engineering, the Institute of Industrial Science (IIS), the University of Tokyo to pursue a doctorate degree in hydrology and water resources with the prestigious scholarship provided by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan. Nine years of extensive study in hydrology and water resources and current doctoral work in hydrological modeling inspired me to undertake a greater challenge in pursuing the research position.

During my master course in IHWR, Tsinghua University, I involved in a water and salt balance project in the Tarim River basin fund by the World Bank. I am the key person to develop the hydrologic model in the project group. We carried out a runoff-evaporation hydrological model for arid region. The results were published as two refereed papers in Shuikexue Jinzhan/Advances in Water Science (in Chinese with English abstract, EI) and one international peer reviewed paper in Hydrological Processes.

The Hydrology and Water Resources Engineering laboratory is an outstanding and important laboratory in hydrological modeling in Japan. It is involved in or related to many Japanese or international projects such as Global Water System Project (GWSP), Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX), Global Land Atmosphere System Study (GLASS), GEWEX Asian Monsoon Experiment (GAME) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). As a graduate student in IIS, I specialized in hydrological modeling with the integration of multidisciplinary advances in providing reliable earth system representation. A distributed biosphere hydrological model (DBHM) was developed. The model system is described in Annual Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, JSCE. In the DBHM, I used multidisciplinary developments in geophysical science to prompt a radical improvement of hydrological simulation. These geophysical advances include the new insights into heat flux in the Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere Transformation (SVAT) processes by meteorologists, progress in getting reliable land surface information from satellite by remote sensing scientists, and developments of Geographic Information System (GIS) technique to extract topographic variables from Digital Elevation Model (DEM). The precipitation probability and its effect to hydrological simulation were investigated. The results are submitted to Journal of Hydrometeorology.

Accumulating these valuable experiences, I am preparing myself for the research position in the area of Hydrology/Land Surface/Climate. I am confident that my research experiences together with my current excellent work in doctoral program have merited me to be qualified to the position.