Ruichen Zhou / 周瑞宸

Recent publications and datasets on satellite altimetry and marine gravity:

SDUST2023VGGA: A global ocean vertical gradient of gravity anomaly model determined from multidirectional data from mean sea surface
Zhou, R., Guo, J., Ya, S., Sun, H., & Liu, X.
Earth System Science Data, 2025, 17(3), 817–836.

SDUST2023VGGA (V1.0) [Data set]
Zhou, R., Guo, J., Ya, S., Sun, H., & Liu, X.
Zenodo, 2024.

Inverting vertical gravity anomaly gradients using multidirectional data from mean sea surface model: A case of Arabian Sea
Zhou, R., Liu, X., Guo, J., Hwang, C., Jia, Y., Chang, X., & Sun, H.
Earth, Planets and Space, 2024, 76(1), Article 153.

On performance of vertical gravity gradient determined from CryoSat-2 altimeter data over Arabian Sea
Zhou, R., Liu, X., Li, Z., Sun, Y., Yuan, J., Guo, J., & Ardalan, A. A.
Geophysical Journal International, 2023, 234(2), 1519–1529.

View all publications →

Marine gravity & vertical gradient inversion

Developing and applying methods to invert gravity anomalies and vertical gravity gradients from satellite altimetry and mean sea surface data, including:

• using grid-based MSS models to derive global vertical gravity gradient fields
• evaluating vertical gravity gradients from along-track CryoSat-2 data over regional seas

Outputs: ESSD 2025 paper · SDUST2023VGGA dataset on Zenodo

These methods support several gravity and seabed topography modelling efforts in my group.

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Altimetry waveform reprocessing

Developed scripts for coastal satellite altimetry waveform reprocessing (such as singular spectrum analysis) to improve data quality for gravity-related applications.

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Student research projects

Led graduate research projects on:

• inversion of ocean vertical gravity gradient anomalies from mean sea surface models
• computing vertical deflection and vertical gravity gradients from along-track sea surface heights

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Engineering & open source

• Vibe coding, shipped:
  • Notebook-Translate — VS Code extension that translates Markdown cells in Jupyter notebooks into Chinese, with streaming output, multiple provider profiles (OpenAI-compatible, Ollama, Baidu), and OS keychain credential isolation.
  • mi-health-mcp — MCP server on Cloudflare Workers that exposes Xiaomi health data (sleep, heart rate, steps) to LLM agents; part of my self-hosted monitoring pipeline.
  • Alert-triage agent — an AI agent that triages server alerts: it connects to the affected host over SSH, checks services, load, and login logs, and reports its conclusion to Telegram. Write-up
• Self-hosted overlay network — Headscale control plane and DERP relay running on a personal VPS, connecting 10+ devices across two countries; setup and evolution documented in the networking posts.
• trellis-for-research — Trellis spec templates and a research workflow for reproducible computational research: a general research-core spec plus a geoscience deep-learning variant, with task modes (exploratory, documentation, durable) that scale checking effort to the work.
• RAG & local LLMs — retrieval-augmented generation over research literature, running on local models via Ollama.

For a full list of education, publications and experience, please see my CV. The CV page is password-protected; email me for access.

View CV →