Abstract:
Coastal cities, where the majority of the global population resides, represent a next frontier scientific challenge in understanding and adapting to changes on local landscapes from urbanization, varied anthropogenic activity, and a changing global environment. Coastal urban environments frequently interact with and often compound the effects of mean global-climate manifested in coastal-boundary layer flows, human processes, and extreme weather events. The presentation will highlight new understanding and methods to represent the interactions between the local coastal-urban and global environments as they both undergo changes due to local land use for urbanization and changing regional/global sea-surface temperatures. These include in-situ and satellite-based observations along the gradients of coastal-cities-rural environments with varied anthropogenic signals along the way, and new modeling approaches that represent the city-natural environment scales as a unified system in space and time. It will also highlight how this understanding is leading to new environmental science and engineering applications, and technologies to promote sustainability of energy, improved air quality, and urban planning in the built environment. The future state of urban air quality, hydrology, human health, and energy demands, together with possible mitigation and adaptation measures to a changing local climate, will be discussed in the context of several coastal cities including; New York City, Los Angeles, San Juan, Houston, and Beijing.