Principal Investigator:
Co-Principal Investigator:
Cities are emerging as the nexus of the energy, water, health, and climate challenges in the 21st century. More than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, and the urban population continues growing. Urban areas are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Urbanization also modifies the Earth’s surface properties, resulting in the well-known “urban heat island” phenomenon and other changes in weather and climate. The urban heat islands can greatly exacerbate the negative impacts of heat waves, which are excessively hot weather lasting for several days or even longer. Heat waves are projected to become more frequent, intense, and longer lasting under a warming climate. Heat is the top cause of weather-related deaths in the US and globally.
This project focuses on informing the design and assessing the effectiveness of urban heat mitigation strategies at local (neighborhood) scales using first principle-based numerical approaches. We focus on the local (neighborhood) scale because advancing climate equity and environmental justice requires knowledge of the local impacts of climate change and mitigation/adaptation strategies. However, there is a strong scale separation between the traditional weather/climate modeling and the tools needed to assess the local impacts of heat mitigation strategies.
The proposed research aims to fill this gap by utilizing hyper-resolution (1-5 m) large-eddy simulations, a new modeling paradigm that differs from traditional weather/climate modeling. We will use Chelsea, an environmental justice community in Massachusetts, as our testbed. To the best of our knowledge, this will be one of the first studies on heat mitigation over a real urban canopy and under realistic weather conditions using meter-scale, building-resolving large-eddy simulations.