PREEVENTS Track 2: Collaborative Research: SHADE: Surface Heat Assessment for Developed Environments

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Extreme heat wave events, exacerbated by the urban heat island effect, can have major impacts on the lives and health of city residents. Projected future temperature increases for many urban areas of the United States will only exacerbate these impacts. This project investigates how various geophysical processes interact to produce this extreme heat, and how heat hazard and the vulnerability and exposure of urban populations to this hazard contribute to the consequences of these extreme events. It will develop and apply methods for the assessment of the magnitude, frequency, and potential consequences of extreme heat events in urban areas at a high resolution in space (throughout a city) and time (throughout a day). Furthermore, these methods will be used to assess how changes to the climate and to the urban fabric, for example via mitigation actions such as adopting green roofs or urban trees, will alter the heat hazard and risk.This project will develop physical and probabilistic models for urban temperature hazards, to accomplish the following project goals: (i) improving the physical modeling of extreme urban heat to better understand its physical precursors, (ii) improving the probabilistic modeling of extreme urban heat to enable more efficient downscaling of its increasing hazard in the future, (iii) understanding and modeling the spatially and temporally varying vulnerability of the urban population to extreme heat, and (iv) combining these improved hazard and vulnerability models to assess the resulting risk and the effectiveness of mitigation strategies that aim to reduce it. The combination of deterministic and probabilistic modeling approaches proposed in this project will allow for more accurate predictions (including appropriate quantification of uncertainties) of current and future high temperature hazards due to the interaction of heat waves and the urban heat island effect in cities. Specific components developed during this research, such as probabilistic temperature models, risk quantification methods, and assessments of the effectiveness of portfolios of risk mitigation strategies will be of interest to other researchers in the scientific community and in industry pursuing related work. The developed methods will be applied to the integrated analysis of cities as Pittsburgh, PA, and Los Angeles, CA.