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Prof. Kevin Cheung joined the School of Emergency Management, NUIST in September 2023 as a Long-Shan Scholar. From 2025, he was awarded the Class A Innovation Project of National Major Talent Program.

Being an atmospheric scientist and meteorologist,  for years research has been on the high-impact weather systems, such as monsoons, tropical cyclones, severe local storms, hails and from recently also wildfire weather. Investigation focuses on the dynamics and physical processes throughout the life cycle of these systems. Due to the anthropogenic environmental changes, many research outputs are also on the influences of natural climate variability and climate change to the behavior of these weather systems.

Current research focuses on system analysis of weather systems and broadly all meteorological hazards, including their risk aspects. By system analysis, concepts from the science of complexity (nonlinearity, criticality, connectivity, adaptiveness, mutual interaction) are applied to reveal the corresponding behavior of the weather and climate systems. Examples include scaling of precipitation, self organization of rain and cloud clusters, and complex network analysis of extreme rainfall events. Understanding whether these fundamental physical properties of the natural systems would change under the warming climate would be crucial to assess the severity of the hazards in the future, and whether our tools for assessment, such as the climate models, are capable for this purpose.

Research tools include ground-based and satellite-based observations and reanalysis datasets. Numiercal models of different types (dynamical, statistical, idealized, stochastic) are also applied to support theory development, validation and applications.

Please also browse my Google Scholar and Researchgate webpage.

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=Ow9qFlsAAAAJ&hl=en

Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kevin-Cheung-17

Our team is recruiting postgraduate (master and PhD) students. Do you have interest in the following research directions? If yes, come and have a discussion with me.

    ★ Tropical cyclones and climate change, from their formation and energetics perspectives

    ★ Tropical cyclone remote rainfall and multiple tropical cyclones development

    ★ Is rainfall really increasing under climate change? Perpectives of small-scale variability and/or large-scale rain clusters characteristics

    ★ Complex network analysis of extreme events, such as monsoon rainfall, drought, typhoon. Do they have connections to remote drivers?

    ★ New and holistic approach to natural hazards risk assessment and analysis of emergency response

Out team's international collaborators include researchers in Australia, Germany and the U.S. Funding will be seeked to support postgraduate students to do exchanges and pay visits to these partners.

Recent publications (* corresponding author):

Čavlina Tomašević, I., P. Fox-Hughes, K. K. W. Cheung, P. J. Beggs, V. Vučetić, J. Marsden-Smedley, and M. T. Prtenjak, 2025: Meteorological analysis of an extreme pyroconvective wildfire at Dunalley-Forcett, Australia. Natural Hazards (in press).

Cheung*, K. K. W., U. Ozturk, N. Malik, A. Agarwal, R. Krishnan, and R. Balaji, 2025: A review of synchronization of extreme precipitation events during monsoons from complex network perspective. J. Hydrology, doi:/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2024.132604.

Hu, C., C.-Y. Tam, Z. Li, J. Chen, T. N. Chow, Y. Li, K. K. W. Cheung, J.-E. Chu, and Z.-L. Yang, 2024: Impacts of urban heat and surface roughness on landfalling tropical cyclone intensity: A case study based on TC Victor (1997) in coastal south China. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., doi:/10.1029/2024JD040915.

(Editor's highlight: https://eos.org/editor-highlights/impacts-of-urban-heat-and-friction-on-a-tropical-cyclone )

Čavlina Tomašević, I., B. Malečić, V. Vučetić, M. T. Prtenjak, K. K. W. Cheung, P. Fox-Hughes, and P. J. Beggs, 2024: Coupled fire-atmosphere simulations of the Split, Croatia wildfire. J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol., doi:/10.1175/JAMC-D-23-0168.1.

Fang, Z., K. K. W. Cheung*, and Y. Yang, 2024: Contribution from the western Pacific subtropical high index to a deep-learning typhoon rainfall forecast model. Remote Sensing, doi:/10.3390/rs16122207.

Li, Y., Y. Jiang, J. C. L. Chan, and K. K. W. Cheung*, 2024: Development of asymmetric convection in tropical cyclone under environmental uniform flow and vertical wind shear. Adv. Atmos. Sci., doi:/10.1007/S00376-024-3344-2.

Hu, C., C.-Y. Tam, C. L. Loi, K. K. W. Cheung, Y. Li, Z.-L. Yang, Y. M. Au-Yeung, C. Ren, and D. Niyogi, 2023: Urbanization impacts on tropical cyclone rainfall extremes – inferences from observations and convection-permitting model experiments over the South China. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., doi:/10.1029/2023JD038813.

Čavlina Tomašević, I., V. Vučetić, K. K. W. Cheung, P. Fox-Hughes, P. J. Beggs, M. T. Prtenjak, and B. Malečić, 2023: Comparison of meteorological drivers of two large coastal slope-land wildfire events in Croatia and south-east Australia. Atmosphere, 14, doi:/10.3390/ATMOS14071076.

Cheung*, K. K. W., F. Ji, N. Nishant, N. Herold, K. Cook, 2023: Evaluation of convective environments in the NARCliM regional climate modeling system for Australia. Atmosphere, doi:/10.3390/atmos14040690.

Educational Experience

Work Experience

Social Affiliations

• Associate Editor, Frontiers in Environmental Science (Interdisciplinary Climate Studies Section)

• Associated Editor, Frontiers in Earth Science (Atmospheric Science Section)

• Associate Editor, Scientific Online Letters for the Atmosphere (SOLA), Meteorological Society of Japan

• Associate of Risk Frontiers, a natural hazards research and development company in Sydney, Australia

Name of Research Group: