Yushan (Shawn) Han

Yushan (Shawn) Han

Pragmatic idealist, PhD Student, Cyclone Chaser

Who lives here?

My name is Yushan Han (韓雨杉) or Shawn. Welcome to my tree house! Why call it a tree house? It’s because the “杉” character in my name means “Redwood” or “Fir,” and this place is my virtual resident. I’m a PhD student studying Low-pressure systems (cyclones) and developing feature detection algorithms in large-scale atmospheric datasets at the University of California, Davis. My PhD advisor is Paul Ullrich.

I am also the co-founder of the first student meteorology club union in China. The union now has 8 active members from 3 universities and 5 high schools in the provience of Guangdong, where I was born.

Fun Fact: I started chasing typhoons/hurricanes from 4 years old! My introductory typhoon was Dujuan (2003).

Research highlights

  1. I will present our latest paper in preprint, “The evolution of tropical cyclone intensity and size in observations and HighResMIP models,” at the AMS 37th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology (Poster #70, Abstract Link). In this work, we study factors controlling tropical cyclone (TC) intensity-size evolution and develop a novel way to detect TC size in model outputs that enables direct model-observation comparisons.

  2. Our 2025 paper published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmosphere, ‘The System for Classification of Low-Pressure Systems (SyCLoPS): An All-in-One Objective Framework for Large-Scale Datasets’, has been selected as an Eos Editor’s Highlight.

  3. My side project on “Machine learning-based prediction of heat index in selected U.S. cities” has just been published in arXiv preprint. This work was transformed from a graduate-level statistics course’s final project.

  4. I participated in the work titled “A Unified Storm Tracking Framework for Investigating the Climatology of Storms over the Continental United States,” which has been submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmosphere. In this paper, we propose a framework for classifying mesoscale convective systems and expand the capabilities of SyCLoPS to more effectively detect inland low-pressure systems (LPSs) and demarcat their impact zones.

More information on the Publications page.

More about me

I play piano and ukulele. My hobbies include photography, soccer, hiking, stargazing, cooking, video/audio editing, cycling, skiiing, and mapping. I am a fan of Michael Jackson’s music and Sakuraza46’s live performance.