Profile

Dr. Zeng is currently an Assistant Professor at Peking University (PKU) in Beijing, China. He was an Associate Research Scientist (Nov. 2021 - Jan 2022) at Caltech, Assistant Researcher at JIFRESSE of UCLA (Mar. 2019 - Oct. 2021), and Postdoc researcher at Caltech (Feb 2017 - Feb. 2019) after receiving his PhD in 2016 from CUHK in Hong Kong. His research interests include radiative transfer and inverse modeling in atmospheric remote sensing. He received the Richard M. Goody Award by Elsevier/JQSRT in 2023 for his contributions to atmospheric remote sensing. He is currently leading a research group at Peking University to measure global greenhouse gases and air pollutants and understand their evolution using China's FengYun series satellites. 

Project 1: Earth's atmosphere monitored from China's FengYun GEO/LEO satellites

The Geostationary Interferometric Infrared Sounder (GIIRS) onboard China’s FengYun-4 satel- lite series (FY-4A/B) is the first GEO hyperspectral infrared sounder. FY-4A and FY-4B currently operate at 86.5°E and 105°E, respectively. The GIIRS observations cover most of East Asia with a focus on China, with a 2-hour observing cycle. GIIRS measures at a 12 km spatial resolution at nadir and was recently used to retrieve ammonia (Zeng et al. 2023b), CO (Zeng et al. 2023a), formic acid (HCOOH; Zeng et al. 2024), and ozone (Liu et al., 2025, under review)

China's FengYun-3 (FY-3) series of meteorological satellites have formed a constellation of hyperspectral infrared sounders in dawn-dusk, mid-morning, and afternoon sun-synchronous orbits (see Figure 1), providing six global coverages each day with equatorial crossing times at 5:30 am/pm (FY-3E), 10:00 am/pm (FY-3F), and 2:00 am/pm (FY-3D), as shown in Figure 1(a). While the mid-morning and early afternoon orbits are already used by sounders like IASI and TROPOMI (or CrIS), respectively, there is an important observational gap during the dawn-dusk which is filled by FY-3E launched in 2021. It has already been shown that the High Spectral Infrared Atmospheric Sounder (HIRAS) on board the FY-3 series can detect wildfire-induced enhancements of trace gases, including carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds (Hua et al., 2025, under review; Zeng et al., 2025).

Part of the datasets has been made available through published papers. If you are interested in using the full/updated FengYun data, please contact me at zczeng AT pku.edu.cn