He is the PI for the NASA high altitude balloon FPI project called HIWIND, which is the first balloon-borne instrument for thermospheric wind measurements. HIWIND had a very sucessful flight in June 2011 and obtained critically needed daytime thermospheric winds. The results from HIWIND have changed the our view of the high latitude thermosphere circulation. He will fly the HIWIND again in Antarctica in coming years with support from NASA.
He also operates ground based FPI from the Artic to the Antarctica to measure mesospheric and thermospheric winds and study upper atmsopheric dynamics. He is also a PI for an FPI project to deploy instrument in Africa, Canada, China (in collaboration with Chinese Insittutes), and Antarctica.
Qian Wu also is the PI for the NASA project to develope a new lower boundary condition for the NCAR-HAO Thermospheric Ionosphere Electrodynamic General Criculation Model (TIEGCM). TIEGCM is a community model which is wider used by researchers around the world. The new lower boundary condition is based TIMED satellite observations of the lower thermosphere migrating and nonmigrating tide variations. The new lower boundary condition provides more realistic forcing of the tides from the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. New study of by Yamazaki et al. [2013] has shown great improvement of the TIEGCM simulation of the ionospheric current due to tides.