CAREER: CAS-Climate: Climate Driven Risks to Urban Environment – Hybrid Modeling and Adaptation Strategies

Current global-scale Earth systems research leaves critical gaps and barriers for urban areas, which leads to systematic deficiencies in understanding urban climate-driven risks and critical challenges for informing infrastructure system design and operation. This project will mitigate these barriers by advancing global urban science and engineering through addressing two overarching research questions: (i) how does large-scale climate change coupled with urbanization affect local urban climates? and (ii) how can this urban locale knowledge inform the associated risks to infrastructure systems and adaptation strategies?

Outcomes from this project will: (i) advance the knowledge frontier of global urban climate change, impacts, and solutions; (ii) provide a global-scale multi-model characterization of local-scale urban climate change, variability, and uncertainty driven by urbanization coupled with greenhouse gas (GHG) warming; (iii) contribute to development of a new dynamic-urban Community Earth System Model (CESM), and (iv) build a new hybrid urban modeling framework to help forge new global urban science and engineering.

This project aims to contribute to the new field of urban climate science and engineering through developing a new hybrid modeling framework that combines process-based modeling and deep learning approaches. The project will advance the knowledge frontier in climate-driven risks to built environments and adaptation strategies. Objectives of the research are to (i) robustly characterize urban climate change, variability, and uncertainty under greenhouse gas (GHG) warming coupled with urbanization, (ii) establish a pathway to inform infrastructure system design and operation using robust urban projections, and (iii) establish a methodology to evaluate and devise adaptation solutions on large scales.

Research efforts will be integrated with an educational plan designed to (i) motive, engage and inspire young minds and the public to address critical urban challenges and (ii) forge convergent education in urban climate science and engineering to foster students’ creativity. An online, interactive Global Urban Climate Risks Map webtool will be developed and publicly released.

Hands-on sessions and demos will be designed and showcased every year at UIUC summer programs to engage K-12 students, especially female and underrepresented students. A new inter-departmental seminar series and new course materials will be developed and implemented.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.