Dr Yun Li

Dr Yun Li is an environmental statistican with expertise in modelling climate extremes.

Dr Yun Li: developing new statistical methods to understand climate change and variability

Dr Yun Li is an environmental statistician with many years of experience applying statistical methods to model and understand patterns in our changing climate.

  • 31 March 2011 | Updated 24 February 2012
  1. Overview
  2. Publishing History

Overview

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Current activities

Dr Yun Li's research focuses on using statistical modelling to help understand a range of climatology and oceanography processes.

Dr Li is working with a multidisciplinary team of climate scientists and environmental statisticians from the Climate Adaptation Flagship and Water for a Healthy Country Flagship who are specialists in analysing climate variability and extremes as well as climate change detection.

This involves a number of projects supported by Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency and the Western Australian State Government.

Some of Dr Li’s most recent research projects involve determining patterns in extreme rainfall and heat waves from many years of data, determining the connection between rainfall in China and Australia and developing a climate index called the South west Western Australian Circulation (SWAC) Index to quantify the influence of the SWAC on the reduction of rainfall in Southwest Western Australia.

Dr Li has developed deep expertise in:

  • extreme value theory
  • Markov models
  • statistical modelling and data analysis in climatology and oceanography
  • climate variability and extremes
  • climate change detection
  • statistical downscaling models.
    Dr Li is working with a multidisciplinary team of climate scientists and environmental statisticians from the Climate Adaptation Flagship and Water for a Healthy Country Flagship.

Dr Li has also developed and managed a cross-disciplinary international research project working with Chinese climate scientists to understand rainfall and climate change in both China and Australia. The work is funded through the Australia-China Bilateral Climate Change Partnership Program, run by Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (DCEE)

Background

Prior to joining CSIRO Dr Li was based in China and started his first role as a lecturer at the Department of Mathematics at Beijing Agricultural Engineering University.

Five years later he started his Doctorate at the University of Western Australia working on 'the Number of Near-maxima of Random Variables' and completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship on 'Ion Channel Biophysics: Stochastic Modelling and Inference' funded by a large project grant from the Australia Research Council (ARC).

Since joining CSIRO in 2000, Dr Li has worked as a Research Statistician and Senior Research Statistician for the Environmetrics Group at CSIRO Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics.

He has also had many placements as a visiting scientist at international research organisations such as the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, British Antarctic survey and the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, USA.

Academic qualifications

Dr Li has been awarded a:

  • Bachelor of Science in Mathematics awarded in 1987 by Southwest Normal University, Chongqing, China
  • Masters of Science in Statistics awarded in 1990 by  Hebei Institute of Technology, Tianjin, China
  • Doctor of Philosophy in Statistics awarded in 1998 by The University of Western Australia, Perth.

Achievements

Dr Li’s achievements during his career include:

  • many refereed publications, reports and successful collaborations
  • reviewer for many leading climate and statistical journals including: Journal of Climate; Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, Climate Research; International Journal of Climatology; Geophysical Research Letters; Global and Planetary Change; Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres; Monthly Weather Review; Statistics and Probability Letters; Statistical Papers; Journal of Systems Science and Complexity; Metrika 
  • reviewer for the 2010 IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Manage Climate Change Adaptation
  • in 2010-11 Dr Li was offered a travel award from the Australian Academy of Science for Scientific Visits to North America. Dr Li visited Dr Rick Katz at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), USA. The visit focused on the statistical modelling of hot spells and heat waves in Australia using extreme value theory
  • invited as a guest professor of the National Key Laboratory of Numerical Modelling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (LASG), Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) since May 2009
  • In 2005–07 Dr Li developed an Australia-China Climate Change Partnership project-Research on Rainfall and Climate Change in both China and Australia, funded by the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. Dr Li has demonstrated exceptional scientific leadership and adaptability in successfully completing the Australia-China Climate Change Partnership Project (May 2007-June 2009), and in doing so cementing an impressive growing track record in statistical climatology.

Memberships

Dr Li is a member of:

  • The Statistical Society of Australia, Inc. SSAI
  • Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, AMOS
  • International Chinese Statistical Association, ICSA
  • Statistics of Heat Waves Working Group, the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, USA.

Read more about CSIRO's work understanding Climate Change.