Project ATLANTA (ATlanta Land use ANalysis: Temperature and Air quality) seeks to observe, measure, model, and analyze how the rapid growth of the Atlanta, Georgia metropolitan area since the early 1970's has impacted the region's climate and air quality. The primary objectives for this research effort are: 1) To investigate and model the relationship between Atlanta urban growth, land cover change, and the development of the urban heat island phenomenon through time at nested spatial scales from local to regional; 2) To investigate and model the relationship between Atlanta urban growth and land cover change on air quality through time at nested spatial scales from local to regional; and 3) To model the overall effects of urban development on surface energy budget characteristics across the Atlanta urban landscape through time at nested spatial scales from local to regional.
The key goal of Project ATLANTA is to derive a better scientific understanding of how land cover changes associated with urbanization in the Atlanta area, principally in transforming forest lands to urban land covers through time, has, and will, affect local and regional climate, surface energy flux, and air quality characteristics. Allied with this goal is the prospect that the results from this research can be applied by urban planners, environmental managers and other decision-makers, for determining how urbanization has impacted the climate and overall environment of the Atlanta area. This presentation provides an overview of the scientific design of Project ATLANTA and describes some research results that have been achieved to date.
The scientific approach used in relating land cover changes with modifications in the local and regional climate and in air quality, is predicated on the analysis of remote sensing data in conjunction with in situ data (e.g., meteorological measurements) that are employed to initialize local and regional-level numerical models of land-atmosphere interactions. Remote sensing data form the basis for quantifying how land covers have changed within the Atlanta metropolitan area through time from the mid-1970's, when Atlanta's dramatic growth began in earnest, to the present. These remotely sensed data are used to provide input to numerical models that relate land cover change through time with surface energy flux and meteorological parameters to derive temporal models of how land cover changes have impacted both the climatology and the air quality over the Atlanta region. Current remote sensing data (i.e., data obtained during 1997) will be used to calibrate the models and as baseline data for extending the models to predict how prospective future land cover changes will affect the local and regional climate and air quality over the Atlanta-north Georgia region. Additionally, remote sensing data will be used to characterize and measure urbanization and deforestation parameters that can be used to assess, as well as predict, the effects of land use changes on the local microclimate.