Welcome to the website of NOAA-sponsored Project at Texas Tech University related to Urban Heat Island and Urban Heat Advection of Smaller-Sized Cities in the US

PI Dr. Sandip Pal

Project Title: Employing a combined observation and simulation-based framework to investigate spatiotemporal variability in urban heat and associated heat advection

Objectives of the Project

(1) A comprehensive details on urban heat island (UHI) intensity (i.e., UHII) for a small city (i.e. Lubbock) for a year-long period under diverse weather conditions with particular emphasis on summer and spring-time extreme UHI events; (2) performance of a state-of-the-art high-resolution numerical simulations (i.e. the HRRR) for low-to-high UHII regimes using a network of routine observations and field campaign data through detailed model-data mismatch (MDM) estimates; (3) assessment of urban heat advection (UHA for varying wind regimes over the region and other cities using existing data sets; (4) identification of weather conditions yielding excessive heat-related hazards in the urban and suburban regions and over the adjacent rural regions under strong UHA, in particular in night; (5) vertical thermodynamic structures of the ABL upwind and downwind of the city and associated model evaluation through MDM for various weather conditions (e.g., differential heat regimes favoring UHA events, extreme UHI events); and (6) extraction of turbulence features for UHA-dominated ABL in the downwind of the city.

This project aims to obtain a highly resolved information of spatiotemporal variability in urban heat and its advection via separating the two-dimensional advection induced UHI component, including its pattern and magnitude, from the locally heated UHI component. More fundamentally, this work will create pathways for careful interpretation of UHI over any city.