Ocean & Climate Scientist
Zhetao Tan (谭哲韬)
Postdoctoral investigator at LMD-IPSL, École Normale Supérieure - PSL
I study compound ocean climate change by integrating ocean observations, data-quality improvement methods, climate-state diagnostics, and physical–biogeochemical mechanisms to support climate-related risk assessment and adaptation in marine systems.
Observed large-scale and deep-reaching compound ocean state changes over the past 60 years
This paper uses time-of-emergence (ToE) to highlight the increases in impacts of individual and compound changes globally from the surface to the deeper ocean, identifying areas most affected.
Citation: Tan, Z., von Schuckmann, K., Speich, S. et al. Observed large-scale and deep-reaching compound ocean state changes over the past 60 years. Nat. Clim. Chang. 16, 58–68 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02484-x
Reserach Interests (研究方向)
Ocean Observations & Data Quality
Open ocean data processing, in-situ profile quality control, duplicate checking, and bias correction workflows for reusable climate records.
Compound Ocean Climate Change
Climate impact-drivers such as temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and pH, with emphasis on compound exposure and climate hot spots.
Ocean Circulation & Water Masses
Water mass redistribution, freshwater and oxygen budgets, South Atlantic processes, and their links to AMOC under climate change.
Climate Risk & Climate Adaptation
Compound risk assessment, climate exposure information for ocean governance, marine protected areas, exclusive economic zones, and mariculture applications.
Data, tools, and reproducibility
Reusable research outputs
About Me
I am a Ph.D. specializing in Physical Oceanography, Operational Oceanography, and ocean climate change impact, with a particular focus on ocean observations and data quality improvements, water mass and ocean circulation, ocean compound climate change, ocean warming monitoring, and compound risk assessment. I hold my Ph.D from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Supervisors: Prof. CHENG Lijing and Prof. ZHU Jiang) in July 2024.
Currently, I am a post-doc investigator at Department of Geosciences (Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique), École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) since Feb 2025 (Advisors: Prof. Sabrina Speich and Prof. Elaine McDonagh), working for Ice sheet impacts on global ocean circulation (WP5) of the OCEAN:ICE project funded by Horizon Europe.
My research themes encompass operational oceanography, physical oceanography, and climate adaptation. Particularly, I mainly focused on the study of climate impact-drivers which connect physical ocean changes to broader climate impacts and marine governance (MPAs, BBNJ etc.). I constructed and utilized several ocean in-situ observational data products to identify climate hot spot regions and developed frameworks and tools to assess these impacts in different ocean sectors and ocean domains.
Besides, I am the member of International Quality Controlled Ocean Database (IQuOD). I specialize in ocean data processing and analysis, significantly improving the quality of ocean observational data through open-source tools, data validation, quality control, XBT bias correction schemes, duplicate checking, and statistical analysis of climate data trends and variations.
Recent updates
News in Tan et al., 2025, Scientific Data
2025 · Dataset release
The global in-situ salinity profiles dataset since the 1940s was published in Scientific Data and is now freely available.
Dataset: CODC-S can be downloaded via IAP Ocean.
The second version (v2.1) of the CODC Global Ocean Temperature and Salinity Profile Science Database was led by the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other organizations. It contains 18,472,149 temperature profiles and 11,273,326 salinity profiles from January 1940 to November 2024.
Citation: Tan Z, Zhu Y, Cheng L, Gouretski V, Pan Y, Yuan H, Wang Z, Li G, Song X, Zhang B, Bao S, Li Y, Zhu J. 2025. CODC-S: A quality-controlled global ocean salinity profiles dataset. Scientific Data, 12: 917. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05172-9