Machine Learning, Computer Visualization and Physics-Based Modeling for Urban Climate Digital Twin Framework

About the Webinar

Cities are impacted by extreme weather and climate events– and cities, in turn, also create their own local climate through urban heating and rainfall changes. Representing cities and the urban interactions within dynamical weather prediction and climate models is challenging. This challenge is not just because of a city’s relatively small spatial footprint relative to the regional landcover, but also the need for integrating the within-city processes within the urban dynamics.  So coupling of cities and larger climate is an important societal issue and a fascinating dynamical modeling problem as we are often at the limits of how different equations can be applied without violating the inherent assumptions.  This is where the recent growth in computer visualization and machine learning (ML) techniques has been fascinating to help bridge the scales and physics with behavioral or unsensed aspects of the urban systems. This talk will present some ongoing work and highlight upcoming challenges and opportunities under the urban climate digital twin framework that is being continually constructed to study and model weather / climate processes for complex systems and settings like cities, surrounding areas and neighborhoods. 

About the speaker

Dr. Dev Niyogi is William Stamps Farish Chair Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences (Earth and Planetary Sciences), Jackson School of Geosciences, and Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering, and affiliate faculty with Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, as well as the Center for Space Research at The University of Texas at Austin. He is Professor Emeritus at Purdue University and has been the former Indiana State Climatologist.  Dr. Niyogi was the most recent chair of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Board of Urban Environment and is the current board member and Treasurer of the International Association of Urban Climate. He is also a member of the U.S. Department of Energy Biological and Environmental Advisory Committee, and Editor for different journals, including AMS Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, and Computational Urban Sciences. He is the most recent recipient of the AMS Helmut E. Landsberg Award ” For decades of leadership and pathbreaking discoveries related to assessing urban climate extremes, their prediction and mitigation using data-model integration, and local to global partnerships”.