After graduating from the University of California, Davis, advised by Prof. Paul Ullrich, Xingying joined Prof. Alex Hall’s research team as a postdoctoral researcher in January 2017.

Her doctoral research mainly focused on regional climate and modeling over California, and precipitation projections over the western U.S. under climate change. Specifically, Xingying highlighted the value of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) with variable-resolution enabled in regional climate studies (Huang et al., 2016, Huang and Ullrich, 2016). Using this model, She has also quantified the impacts of human-induced climate change on both mean climatology and extreme precipitation events (Huang and Ullrich, 2017). Her academic background also includes geographic information systems and remote sensing.

Xingying's current interests include impacts and attribution of human-induced climate change and climate modeling, especially at regional scales, such as the anthropogenic warming impacts on extreme precipitation events. Increasingly, efforts are being made to understand climate change impacts at regional scales so that stakeholders and policymakers can formulate effective adaptation and mitigation strategies. She is particularly motivated to improve our understanding of complex regional climates and the impacts of future changes in extreme climate events, with potential interdisciplinary collaborations.

Recently, Xingying's research focuses on the anthropogenic warming impacts on California snowpack and flood events over the Sierra Nevada under both normal and extreme wet years (in the case of the recent period 2015–2017). The results from this work will help diagnose the impacts of climate change on the water resources and allow water mangers to identify possible strategies to manage extreme conditions. On the other hand, due to the complex terrain over the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and other mountainous areas, the orographic precipitation is still not well resolved at fine scales ( less than 10 km) in up-to-date downscaling simulations. She is investigating how to adjust parameters in models’ microphysics schemes to improve their representation of precipitation over complex topography at fine scales. 

Xingying's research efforts also include the exploration of changes in large-scale water vapor transport patterns, particularly in the form of atmospheric rivers, under the warming climate. This work involves the detection of modulated water vapor influx patterns, the resulting changes in precipitation extremes, and the features of atmospheric rivers at fine scales under different warming scenarios.