Yongxiang Huang

NP Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences

The 2013 Division Outstanding Young Scientist Award is awarded to Yongxiang Huang for fundamental contributions in the application of the Empirical Mode Decomposition and Hilbert Spectral Analysis to intermittent and scaling signals.

Yongxiang Huang has provided fundamental contributions in the application of the Empirical Mode Decomposition and Hilbert Spectral Analysis (EMD-HSA) to intermittent and scaling signals. The EMD-HSA methodology was developed in 1998 by Norden Huang to analyse nonlinear and non-stationary time series to locally extract amplitude and frequency information. It is a new decomposition method, which was applied in many fields of science and encountered a huge success. Huang developed a new way to apply the EMD-HSA technique to scaling and intermittent time series. It is a generalisation of this – now classical – technique, and can be applied to extract the multifractal spectrum of such series. It was shown to be more precise than the structure functions or detrended fluctuation analysis, or wavelet analysis; when there is a strong deterministic forcing, this method is poorly affected and provides the best way to extract the underlying scaling properties of the signal. Huang applied the method to turbulence series (laboratory, oceanic turbulence, atmospheric boundary layer turbulence) and to hydrological time series. It may be applied to many other fields and the method and Matlab code are open to colleagues that want to test this approach to their own data.

Huang is a very solid young researcher, with impressive capacities in numerical data analysis, and theoretical developments.