The urban climatology studies seek to observe, measure, model, and to analyze how the rapid growth of urban areas impacts the region's climate and air quality. The primary objectives for this research effort are:
- To investigate and model the relationship between urban growth, land cover change, and the development of the urban heat island phenomenon;
- To model the overall effects of urban development on surface energy budget characteristics across urban landscapes.
The goal is to derive a better scientific understanding of how land cover changes associated with urbanization, principally in transforming forest lands to urban land covers through time, has, and will, effect 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 area. It is main intent to make the results available form this investigation to help facilitate measures that can be applied to mitigate urban climatology or air quality degradation, or to design alternate measures to sustain or improve the overall urban environment in the future.
New York City urban climate needs a better understanding of how air mixes between subterranean, street-level and regional airflow. Important quality of life issues, including everyday pulmonary health and even occasional emergency conditions depend upon this understanding. Accordingly, an international team of urban climatologists is focused on this complex exchange of air. In this preliminary study, hypotheses are put forward, a method is developed and tested, data is charted and analyzed, and results are scrutinized for meaningful lessons. Initial results show the efficacy of our methodology and the urgency for an expanded study.
Climatologists and engineers know little about subways as a component of urban climate. Understanding the ventilation of the subway system is important because dilution of stale, subway air is dependent on the rate and the volume of air exchanged with street-level air. Subterranean ventilation is a function of momentum (wind speed x vent size x duration) and divided into passive (somewhat effective) and active (less-than effective) mixing with street-level air.
Finally, there are the effects of regional and local weather conditions to urban climatology that are beyond the scope of preliminary studies. These substantially influence wind flow in the subway system.
There has been a simultaneous growth in the developed urban and suburban land area of big cities, which is expected to have increased the magnitude of the UHI and its spatial extent and influenced badly on urban climatology . The long-term urban warming component of UHI trends can be evaluated using differences between urban and rural climate stations. However, many cities do not have temperature records at a sufficiently fine spatial scale for mapping purposes. Instead, such spatial data are collected occasionally by direct field measurement or by inference from remotely sensed satellite date.