About Ge Chen’s work
From March to September 1999, Ge Chen held a Croucher Visitorship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. At the time, Chen was based at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Biography
Ge Chen earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at Ocean University of China, where he became a professor and supervised doctoral students. He studies what satellite measurements can tell us about the ocean, from the movement of individual eddies to patterns that extend across entire ocean basins.
Chen developed a method for estimating rainfall over the world’s oceans from satellite altimeter readings. He also examined how often an altimeter needs to sample the sea surface to distinguish one ocean signal from another, a question that bears on the design of future satellites. During a strong El Niño event, he used satellite observations to trace the north–south movement of a belt of calm winds in the Pacific. By combining measurements from two instruments, a scatterometer and an altimeter, he identified three regions of concentrated wave activity in the equatorial Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans. In each ocean, the pattern strengthened towards the east.