Jiping Xie

Jiping Xie is a physical oceanographer. He obtained his PhD in geophysical fluid dynamics at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2008.

Xie focuses on developing an ocean and sea-ice data assimilation system. Sea ice has a huge impact on the commercial traffic in the Arctic: In recent years, much more traffic has been going on due to the rapid decline of sea ice. How much sea ice there is and how thick it is where is relevant for how navigable the Arctic routes are. However, accurately forecasting sea ice is difficult: Forecasts cannot properly address society’s requirements because not enough knowledge exists on processes involving sea ice – the available observations are quite limited. Xie is trying to circumvent this problem by using data assimilation in his work. He also evaluates and investigates new types of ocean and sea-ice observations in the related forecast systems. He is also responsible for maintaining the Arctic Ocean and sea-ice reanalysis for the Copernicus Marine Services. Another field of research Xie focuses on is trying to fully understand the impact of sea-ice thickness observations in climate research. For this, he is working on combining data assimilation and machine learning methods. The goal is to obtain a more accurate sea-ice thickness reanalysis for  the years before 2010.