Storms, Forms, and Complexity of the Urban Canopy: How Land Use, Settlement Patterns, and the Shapes of Cities Influence Severe Weather

Urban areas increasingly concentrate population, resources, wealth creation, and innovation. As cities grow and develop, they affect the physical environment at various scales ranging from the urban core, across suburbs and into outlying and sometimes distant areas. Yet the urbanization process and its manifold influences on weather have been understudied to date, particularly for small to mid-sized cities. Of particular societal concern are the vulnerabilities of human settlements to various forms of severe weather. Although prior research has evaluated storm modification by urban areas for specific cities, there has not been a systematic study of how the size, shape, configuration, and complexity of cities and adjacent lands affect storms and associated meteorological phenomena. The US Great Plains offer an excellent natural laboratory to investigate these relationships: it experiences frequent severe weather and includes cities in a wide variety of shapes and sizes that are relatively isolated from one another amidst a matrix of agricultural land uses with minimal terrain effects. This project explores the hypothesis that storms of a certain size and intensity respond to the various and variable biogeophysical imprints of the urbanized area, and depend on city size, shape, activity, and on the landscape matrix that embeds the urbanized area. We examine the roles of the physical, hemical, and human dimensions of urbanized areas through the following scientific questions: Q1. Does city size affect storm initiation, demise, track, or intensity? Q2. Does city shape affect storm initiation, demise, track, or intensity? Q3. Does the urban dome air pollution state affect storm initiation, demise, track, or intensity? Q4. Can effective thresholds be determined for various for size, shape, and pollution states? If so, how do they vary along environmental gradients? Q5. How can the concept of land architecture serve to bridge biogeoscientific perspective on urban regions with those arising from planning and design of urban infrastructure? We address these questions using a combination of: (i) mesoscale and convective-scale meteorological models with urban canopy and atmospheric chemistry submodels to understand the role of urban pollution and form (ii) diverse spaceborne remote sensing data (e.g., MODIS, VIIRS, OMI, TM/ETM+, ASTER, and Orbview-3) and ground level observations (NEXRAD weather radar, weather stations, US EPA air pollution monitoring networks, and phenological observers) to conduct statistical analyses linking spatiotemporal patterns in the landscape and city with storm characteristics and behavior and (iii) structured interviews with scientists, planners, and designers to develop a multi-scale conceptual model of urban dynamics that facilitates productive interactions between these groups. Our interdisciplinary team spans multiple fields including terrestrial and atmospheric remote sensing, landscape ecology, urban and landscape planning, and meteorological modeling and will synthesize these results to develop an integrated assessment of the role of urban size and form on atmospheric phenomena in the US Great Plains.