About

Zhengyu Liu is the Max Thomas Professor of Climate Dynamics in the Department of Geography at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on the modeling and understanding of the global climate system and ocean-atmosphere-land interactions, with applications to climate change and climate variability of the past, present, and future. His projects include modeling climate variability on seasonal to interdecadal time scales, as well as the climate changes associated with the last glacial/interglacial cycles and future global warming. Liu is also interested in the dynamics of the general oceanic circulation and geophysical fluid dynamics. He holds a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from MIT, an M.S.. in Dynamic Meteorology from the Chinese Academy of Science, and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Nanjing Institute of Meteorology, China. Liu has contributed extensively to the field through research, publications, and teaching, including courses in dynamic meteorology and climate change.

Research topics

• Physical geography
• Oceanography
• Climatology
• Geography
• Paleontology
• Geology
• Environmental science
• Earth science
• Geomorphology

Selected publications

• Natural Play Park : Landscape design of urban public parks in response to “nature-deficit disorder”

  Open Collections · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This graduate project explores how landscape design can help urban youth reconnect with nature amidst increasing academic pressure, sedentary lifestyles, and nature deficit disorder. Located in Changfeng Park, Shanghai, the project aims to transform an old mechanical playground into a nature-based, adventure- oriented recreational landscape for youth. Drawing on theories of therapeutic landscape design, sensory design, and unstructured play, the project integrates ecological learning and encourages independent exploration. Through site-specific ecological analysis and precedent studies, the project aims to create a socially interactive and sensory-rich environment within a contemporary urban park setting, thereby promoting the physical and mental well-being of young people.

  PublisherDOI

• Zero-dimensional antimony(III)-doped indium(III) chloride hybrids with unusual green self-trapped exciton emission by significant angular deformation of the expanded metal octahedron

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The interleukin-1 family of cytokines as diagnostic biomarkers of rotator cuff injury

  Journal of Orthopaedics · 2025-09-17

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Reduced Antarctic Bottom Water overturning rate during the early last deglaciation inferred from radiocarbon records

  Nature Communications · 2025-08-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  The rapid CO2 rise during the early deglaciation is often linked to enhanced ventilation by intensified Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) overturning. The recorded radiocarbon ventilation seesaw during the early deglaciation, which describes improved Southern Ocean and reduced North Atlantic abyssal radiocarbon ventilation, has been interpreted as intensified AABW and reduced North Atlantic Deep Water convections. However, abyssal radiocarbon records also reflect changes in surface reservoir ages and interior water mass mixing. Using isotope-enabled simulations, we show that this seesaw results from weakened AABW overturning and decreased Southern Ocean surface reservoir age. With AABW occupying the abyssal ocean, weakened AABW overturning increases transit time, with the magnitude increasing northward. This transit time increase outpaced the declining $$\Delta ^{14}C_{{atm}}$$ induced Southern Ocean surface reservoir age decrease in the abyssal North Atlantic, but not in the abyssal Southern Ocean, thus producing a radiocarbon ventilation seesaw. Our results suggest sluggish deep water overturning from both poles during the early deglaciation. Reconstructed radiocarbon ventilation seesaw and reduced Southern Ocean surface reservoir age imply reduced Antarctic Bottom Water overturning parallel to the weakened North Atlantic Deep Water overturning during the early deglaciation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Focusing on Projection-Stable Patch: Cross-View Localization with Geometric-Semantic Alignment

  2025-10-19

  article

  This paper presents a novel feature alignment strategy for cross-view geo-localization to bridge the perspective gap between ground and satellite images. Existing methods for cross-view geo-localization often overlook factors such as occlusion and distortion errors caused by viewpoint transformation. These issues lead to reduced accuracy in complex scenes. To address this issue, we propose a framework comprising two novel components: a perspective-driven attention fusion (PDAF) module that aligns ground and satellite features through cross-view semantic correlation, effectively preserving structural consistency during view transformation; and a projection-stable patch-guided pose optimizer (PSPG) that enhances geometric reliability by selectively focusing on projection-stable patch to refine pose estimation. The PDAF module mitigates information loss through attention fusion between ground and bird’s-eye-view (BEV) feature maps representations, while the PSPG refines pose estimation by dynamically suppressing unstable features through geometrically unstable token merging. Comprehensive evaluations on KITTI and Ford Multi-AV datasets demonstrate our method’s superiority in orientation estimation and competitive location accuracy compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Qualitative results further confirm the framework’s robustness in complex localization scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/RobVisLab-NJUST/CVLGSA

  PublisherDOI

• Increase in Deglacial Ocean Heat Content Linked to Contrasts in Extratropical Warming

  Geophysical Research Letters · 2025-07-24 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Proxy‐based reconstructions suggest that equilibrium changes in global mean sea surface temperature (ΔGMSST) are nearly equivalent to changes in mean ocean temperature (ΔMOT) on glacial‐interglacial timescales over the past 900,000 years. However, the underlying mechanisms responsible for this relationship remain poorly understood. Here we use simulations from Paleoclimate Modeling Intercomparison Project Phase 3 and 4 (PMIP3/4) to investigate equilibrium ΔMOT and its linkage to sea surface temperature changes between the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ∼21,000 years ago) and pre‐Industrial. Results show that PMIP3/4 simulations generally underestimate proxy‐based ΔMOT. Regression analysis reveals that LGM MOT is strongly modulated by mid‐latitude SST cooling, with the Southern Ocean having a greater influence compared to other oceanic regions, thus helping explain why models with similar ΔGMSSTs exhibit significantly different ΔMOTs. Additionally, we find a strong relationship between simulated Antarctic sea‐ice coverage and Southern Ocean SST changes, with implications for constraining sea‐ice reconstructions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A dipole pattern of orbital-scale precipitation oxygen isotope variation in North African monsoon region and the driving mechanism

  Atmospheric chemistry and physics · 2025-11-26

  articleOpen access

  Abstract. On orbital timescales, the North African (NAF) monsoon variability is featured by dramatic fluctuations between wet and dry periods, which have played a significant role in early human migration and the development of agricultural civilizations. However, the spatial patterns of hydroclimate response, particularly changes in rainfall and precipitation oxygen isotopes (δ18Op) remain poorly constrained due to the scarcity of proxy records. Here, we use the isotope-enabled Community Earth System Model (iCESM) to investigate the spatial-temporal variations of both rainfall and δ18Op across the NAF region (15° W–35° E, 8° N–25° N) on orbital timescales. Our analysis shows that both δ18Op and rainfall exhibit a clear precessional signal. Enhanced Northern Hemisphere summer insolation (NHSI) intensifies land-sea thermal contrast, thereby strengthening monsoon circulation and leading to widespread increases in monsoon rainfall. In contrast, δ18Op presents a spatially dipole pattern, with depletion in the southern NAF (15° W–35° E, 8° N–17° N) and enrichment in the northern part (15° W–35° E, 17° N–25° N). Tagging experiments further reveal that the depletion in the south is primarily driven by en route depletion resulting from rainout process along air mass trajectories over the African continent, whereas enrichment in the north results from shifts in moisture sources, with a reduced contribution from distant sources and an increased influence of local sources. This work advances our understanding of past hydroclimate variability in the NAF region, while also highlighting the challenges associated with reconstructing past variations in the distribution of δ18Op based on discrete site data.

  PublisherDOI

• Precession and ice sheet control of hydroclimate in Arctic East Beringia over the past 240,000 years

  Research Square · 2025-07-22 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Follow My Flow: Unveiling Client-Side Prototype Pollution Gadgets from One Million Real-World Websites

  2025-05-12

  article

  Prototype pollution vulnerability often has further consequences—such as Cross-site Scripting (XSS) and cookie manipulation—that are achieved via so-called gadgets, i.e., code snippets that change the control- or data-flow of a victim program for malicious purposes. Prior works face challenges in finding prototype pollution gadgets for such consequences because the control- or data-flow change sometimes needs the injection of complex property values to replace existing undefined ones through prototype pollution, which may not be seen before or cannot be solved by existing constraint solvers. In this paper, we design a dynamic analysis framework, called Gala, to automatically detect client-side prototype pollution gadgets among real-world websites, and implement an open-source version of Gala. Our key insight is to borrow existing defined values on non-vulnerable websites to victim ones where such values are undefined, thus guiding the property injection to flow to the sinks in gadgets. Our evaluation of Gala against one-million websites reveals 133 zero-day gadgets that are not found by prior works. For example, one gadget was from Meta's software and another from the Vue framework. Both have acknowledged and fixed it, with Meta rewarding us a bug bounty and Vue assigning CVE-2024-6783. Our evaluation also shows that 23 websites with prototype pollution vulnerabilities—which do not have further consequences as reported by prior works—have consequences due to gadgets found by Gala. In addition to the Meta and Vue gadgets, we also responsibly disclosed all the zero-day gadgets and those newly-discovered prototype pollution consequences to their developers.

  PublisherDOI

• Summer and nonsummer climatic signals in speleothem δ ¹⁸ O revealed by loess microcodium δ ¹⁸ O in East Asia

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-07-11 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Speleothem δ 18 O records from central southern China have long been regarded as a key benchmark for Asian summer monsoon intensity. However, the similar δ 18 O minima observed among precession minima and their link to seasonal precipitation mixing remains unclear. Here, we present a 400,000-y record of summer precipitation δ 18 O from loess microcodium, which captures distinct precession cycles similar to those seen in speleothem δ 18 O records, particularly during glacial periods. Notably, our microcodium δ 18 O record reveals very low-δ 18 O values during precession minima at peak interglacials, a feature absent in speleothem δ 18 O records from central southern China. This discrepancy suggests that the mixed summer and nonsummer climatic signals substantially influence the speleothem δ 18 O records from central southern China. Proxy-model comparisons indicate that the lack of very low-δ 18 O values in speleothem δ 18 O records is due to an attenuated summer signal contribution, resulting from a lower summer-to-annual precipitation ratio in southern China at strong monsoon intervals. Our findings offer a potential explanation for the long-standing puzzle of the absence of 100- and 41-kyr cycles in speleothem δ 18 O records and underscore the critical role of seasonality in interpreting paleoclimatic proxies in central southern China. These insights also have broader implications for interpreting speleothem δ 18 O records globally, advocating for a more multiseason interpretive framework.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: P2C2--isotope-enabled TRAnsient Climate Evolution of the last 21,000 years (iTRACE21)----Understanding Deglacial Climate/Isotope Changes Using iCESM

  NSF · $135k · 2017–2019

• NIH Grant K08HL075410

  NIH · $667k · 2009

• Collaborative Research: Pliocene and Pleistocene transient climate simulations and model-proxy comparisons for surface temperature and monsoon circulation

  NSF · $62k · 2011–2016

• Assessing and Understanding Oceanic Climate Forcing on Decadal Climate Variability from Surface Heat Flux

  NSF · $652k · 2023–2027

• Collaborative Research: P2C2--isotope-enabled TRAnsient Climate Evolution of the last 21,000 years (iTRACE21)----Understanding Deglacial Climate/Isotope Changes Using iCESM

  NSF · $305k · 2014–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Bette L. Otto‐Bliesner

  NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research

  127 shared

• Shaoqing Zhang

  115 shared

• Liang Ning

  Nanjing Normal University

  64 shared

• Mi Yan

  64 shared

• Lixin Wu

  Laoshan Laboratory

  62 shared

• Esther C. Brady

  NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research

  61 shared

• Jian Liu

  China Meteorological Administration

  55 shared

• Jiaxu Zhang

  51 shared