CPAESS Discovery Seminar with Yaowei Li, NOAA Climate and Global Change  Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the California Institute of Technology

May 2026 CPAESS Seminar with Yaowei Li

Date:  

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 at 11:00 am MT (Virtual)

Summary

Wildfires are becoming increasingly frequent and intense in a warming climate, reversing decades of air quality improvements, as seen in the 2025 Los Angeles Fires and many other record-breaking events worldwide. Crucially, what burns locally doesn’t stay local—wildfire smoke often rises, travels, and affects the atmosphere and climate far beyond its source. I will share new insights into the far-reaching impacts of wildfire smoke based on aircraft measurements, satellite observations, and modeling. At the regional scale, I will present first-of-its-kind aircraft sampling of wildfire smoke at ~14.5 km altitude, revealing unexpectedly large aerosol particles that enhance outgoing radiation by ~35%, challenging conventional model assumptions. Next, I will show how high-altitude wildfire smoke perturbs Earth’s energy balance and global temperatures, with the 2019/20 Australian wildfires leaving detectable climate fingerprints in the atmosphere comparable to major volcanic eruptions, and causing the strongest stratospheric warming of this century.

About Yaowei Li

Dr. Yaowei Li is a NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow co-hosted at MIT and Caltech, as well as a Caltech Foster and Coco Stanback Postdoctoral Scholar. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Engineering from Harvard University and a B.S. in Environmental Science from Peking University. His research examines how atmospheric aerosols affect air quality and climate, with a focus on wildfire and volcanic emissions. He has developed and deployed instruments on aircraft, drones, ground stations, and in laboratory settings to measure aerosols and gas pollutants from the surface to the stratosphere, integrating these measurements with models to study urban air pollution and aerosol-climate interactions. His ongoing work combines satellite remote sensing and atmospheric modeling to study the long-term effects of wildfire aerosols in the global atmosphere. Dr. Li serves as Co-PI for aerosol instruments on NASA and NOAA high-altitude aircraft missions and is a member of the AMS Middle Atmosphere Committee and the AGU Atmospheric Sciences Early Career Committee.
 

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