Erin Wetherley successfully defends PhD

Abstract: More than half the world’s population lives in cities, and urban populations are growing by an estimated 1.5 million people per week. Urban environments represent an extreme form of land cover modification that produces elevated urban heat and leaves urban populations increasingly vulnerable to illness, poor air quality, and strained resources. These problems are not uniform across a city, varying with local mixtures of material types, structure, and vegetation. In particular, urban vegetation can help reduce urban heat; however its effectiveness as a cooling strategy similarly varies across a city depending on local conditions.

The goal of this dissertation is to provide a better understanding of local urban climate variability across large urban landscapes, and its interaction with urban vegetation in particular. In this work, I focus on the Los Angeles metropolitan area, one of four megacity regions in the United States and subject to increasingly frequent droughts. I combine a unique NASA remote sensing dataset with field measurements, GIS data, and an urban energy balance model to characterize urban climate and vegetation variability across space and time. Results demonstrate that while small scale conditions produce local urban climate variability, significant drivers of this variability can be studied and quantified across large spatial domains.

Bio: Erin Wetherley is a NASA Earth & Space Science Fellow who uses remote sensing to study dynamic urban environments across broad spatial and temporal domains. Prior to UCSB, she graduated magna cum laude from Brown University and worked for 4 years as a GIS manager in the field of land preservation.