CESOC COLLOQUIUM by Katia Lamer

© private

Advances in urban atmospheric monitoring and simulation

Both weather extremes driven by global climate change and intentional or unintentional releases of harmful substances impact human life in urban centers. This intersection between climate sciences and national security motivates this talk. Because urbanization adds on to the complexity and heterogeneity of natural environments at various scales, we begin by providing an overview of the array of observation system and climate models developed for scales from global to city wide. Outstanding gaps in our ability to monitor and simulate the variability of smaller scale phenomenon relevant to urban environment have led to the formation of BNL’s Center for Multiscale Applied Sensing. This talk presents some of the recent RD&D efforts of the center namely: 1- the development of a new numerical scheme, named the Quasi-Solid Box Method, for representing the impact of buildings and other obstacles in high-resolution climate models and 2- the development of a mobile observatory capable of collecting wind, temperature, cloud, and precipitation measurements completely autonomously (i.e., off-the-grid). Details about the capabilities of the CMAS mobile observatories are given as well as a few examples of how the platform was deployed to collect observations in New York City focusing on improving our understanding of the impact of skyscrapers on wind and atmospheric dispersion.