Assistant Professor Lei Zhao will lead a new NASA funded project hoping to sharpen existing tools used for modeling urbanization. With current technology falling behind scientific need, Zhao’s team will use satellite data to fill in gaps and present a broader picture of how urbanization and climate change interact on different scales.
Coupled together, climate change and urbanization make up one of the greatest challenges society faces moving into an uncertain future. Though growing cities are often viewed as contributing to negative climate change impacts, some researchers seek to re-envision urban landscapes as capable of shielding residents from climate change related events.
However, bringing this vision to life requires advanced data and tools to better understand urbanization. Such tools are largely lagging, due to missing global high-resolution urban surface constraints in Earth system modeling, inability to simulate dynamic urban land change in state-of-art Earth systems models (ESMs), and limited high-resolution modeling capabilities over urban landscapes in advanced ESMs and Earth System Digital Twins (ESDTs).
Zhao and his team will work to improve these modeling deficiencies by using satellite observations and satellite derived products to represent properties of urban areas in ESMs. With this new data, the project looks to further advance urban representation in ESMs by providing multiple realizations of high-resolution (~1 km) urban-land-surface datasets as boundary conditions and developing km-scale climate modeling capability of urban land cover land use change.
To encourage further advancement of high-resolutions ESMs, all datasets created from this project will all be publicly released upon completion. Additionally, with the incorporation of more human systems within ESMs through representation of urban areas, Zhao hopes his work will lead to the development of advanced Land-Earth System Digital Twins.
Project collaborators include Professor Karen Seto from Yale University and Dr. Tirthankar Chakraborty from Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL).