Description:

Currently majority of the people in the US live in urban areas and an increasing number of people are moving to denser cities. Our current knowledge of weather and climate processes in urban environments is incomplete. The knowledge gap is primarily related to lack of high quality observations of critical meteorological and climatological variables at required spatial and temporal resolution. Urban areas, unlike any other environments, are highly heterogenous. Urban surfaces have varying physical, thermal, and hygroscopic properties. These underlying variations impact weather and climate processes.

This session invites studies that use innovative observations to understand the urban environment at multiple spatial scales- city-scale (order of 10 km), neighborhood-scale (order of 1000 m), street-scale (order of 100 m), and building scale (order of 5-10 m). Observations could include fixed weather stations, micro-weather networks, ground based remote sensing, satellite based remote sensing as wells as mobile sensors. We also encourage studies that use big-data/social-networks to understand the urban environment.