Observing The Boundary-layer Dynamics Over New York City

Majority of our current population reside in urban areas and most of our wealth is concentrated in Cities. As the computational processing power is rapidly increasing, the next generation regional forecast models will have the capacity to run at sub-km scales. Hence there is an urgent need to represent urban land cover and urban scale processes. However, urban landcover is dominated by a variety of built materials interspersed with vegetative surfaces and bare soil. The materials differ in their hygro-thermal properties i.e., their inherent capacity to retain heat and moisture. The material boundaries that differentiate these surfaces are abrupt and irregular, adding to the complexity. This underlying surface heterogeneity and the addition of point sources such as waste heat from buildings and traffic give rise to substantial uncertainty in observing and modeling the urban environment. Traditional meteorological platforms are unable to capture these complex urban scale interactions. This talk will elucidate on our current observational and modeling framework in the densely populated New York City. An array of profilers that probe the momentum, thermal and scalar structure of the urban boundary layer coupled to a dense hydro-meteorological sensor network, flux towers and building energy use monitors are continuously used to capture the complex urban scale processes. The talk will also elaborate on how this rich dataset is used to capture the complex urban-coastal interactions in the densely built New York City. The talk will also detail on how the observational platform is used to enhance our modeling and forecast platform.