Prof. Yongyun Hu received the Second Prize of the 2015 Outstanding Research in Natural Sciences of Higher Educations for his outstanding research on “Widening of the Hadley circulation and its climate effects”. This award is established by the Ministry of Education of China.

The Hadley circulation is one of the most important atmospheric circulation systems. Its changes have significant impacts on tropical, subtropical and extratropical climates. Prof. Hu’s paper (Hu and Fu, 2007, Atmos. Chem. Phys.) was among the earliest works to demonstrate that the Hadley circulation has been expended poleward in the past few decades. This subject has become a hot research direction in climate change studies since then. In their series of studies, Prof. Hu and his group showed that widening of the Hadley circulation has strong seasonality; they demonstrated the differences of Hadley circulation widening between observations and simulations; they revealed different contributions of various anthropogenic forcings and pointed out that increasing greenhouse gases, stratospheric ozone depletion, and sea surface temperature warming are the key factors in causing the widening of the Hadley circulation; they also addressed that widening of the Hadley circulation would lead to poleward shift of the subtropical dry zone, and that the shift of the dry zone shall impact on ecosystems there.

Prof. Hu’s works have profound impacts on the climate science community, and their papers are extensively cited by peers, including IPCC-AR5.