MIT EAPS Directory

Wanying Kang's research focuses on the atmospheric dynamics of Earth and other planetary bodies. She has explored the dynamic teleconnection between the tropical Madden-Julian Oscillation and the breaking of the polar vortex, which provides implications for extreme weather in a future warmer climate. Meanwhile, she investigated the climate on high obliquity aquaplanets (a type of planets with their rotation axes pointed toward the host star) and made predictions that these planets would in general be warmer regardless of the existence of ice—which, together with other dynamic reasons, leads to a stratosphere that is orders of magnitude more moist. These findings may have important implications for habitability and observation.

Kang holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and an undergraduate degree in Physics from Peking University. She was an EAPS Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow working with John Marshall and Sara Seager.

Her major goal is to build up fundamental understandings of the atmospheric/oceanic dynamics on Earth and other planetary bodies, taking numerical simulations as a vehicle, and to find potentially observable consequences through the collaborations with other groups in EAPS. As she tries to find observables for atmospheric circulation on exoplanets, Kang is looking into the atmospheric circulation on the superhot lava worlds and the ocean circulation on icy moons, given the potential to observe them in more detail in the near future.