His primary research interests are in the areas of satellite remote sensing of global precipitation, cloud, and severe weather events, with an emphasis on the cloud object recognition in space borne radar and radiometer observations. Chuntao completed his Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences at the University of Wyoming in 2003, where he also stationed at McMurDo, Antarctic monitoring the ozone hole for two seasons. Then he joined University of Utah working on the global precipitation and severe weather events using NASA satellites. Currently Chuntao maintains an observatory measuring the fair weather electric field at Barrow, Alaska, and is a science team member of NASA precipitation science.