[3] He entered university after the Cultural Revolution had ended, and studied oceanography, though he had never seen the ocean before.
[9] While at Hawaiʻi, he was faculty in the International Pacific Research Center of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.
[11] In 2013, a study co-authored by Xie and published in Nature suggested that the slowdown in global warming was tied to cooling in parts of the Pacific Ocean.
[19][20] In 2019, Xie published research with scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where they modelled Hadley cells to predict changes in the monsoon season of parts of Asia.
[21][22] In a 2022 article published by the World Economic Forum and The Conversation and co-authored by Xie, the authors claim that tropical cyclones have been increasing in intensity over time.