Solar Farming Research Proposal Earns Student a NASA Fellowship

Chongxing Fan, a Ph.D. student at U-M Climate and Space, has been selected for the highly competitive Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology fellowship.

As part of the FINESST fellowship, NASA has awarded $150,000 to fund Fan’s research proposal, “Impacts of Solar Farming on Surface Energy Budget and Climate from Long-Term NASA Satellite Observations.”

“We will implement the solar farm as a new land type in the climate model. The treatment will be based on observational constraints from our previous satellite observation analyses. We will use this modified model with an improved representation of solar farms to study the radiative effect due to the large-scale deployment of solar farms,” said Fan. “We will further investigate the impact on the regional and global climate system, which will benefit policymakers in building new solar farms.”

Out of the 932 proposals received, NASA’s Earth Science Division reviewed 394 proposals, and the Science Mission Directorate selected only 62 proposals for awards.  Fan’s faculty advisor is Professor Xianglei Huang, Ph.D.