Urban climate and air quality have direct human health and well-being impacts and have important interactions through land-air exchange of energy and water at multiple scales including those currently…

This federal contract award, with ID NNX17AG61A, was issued by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the Regents of the University of California at Riverside (UC Riverside), a non-profit organization and 1862 land grant college. The $197,521 cooperative agreement is part of a citizen science initiative to study urban climate and air quality in the Los Angeles metropolitan region. The project aims to integrate remotely sensed data, in-situ sensor networks maintained by citizen scientists, and atmospheric modeling to evaluate the impact of urban vegetation on climate and air pollution at the neighborhood scale. This work is intended to enhance the value of satellite data for urban applications and develop predictive capabilities for neighborhood-level climate and air quality. The contract does not have a set-aside designation, and the ultimate completion date is February 28, 2019.

Urban climate and air quality have direct human health and well-being impacts and have important interactions through land-air exchange of energy and water at multiple scales including those currently resolved at the resolution of satellite products (typically 1M 10S KM). Notably, increasing urban vegetation has become an important policy goal of many urban policy makers with expectations for reducing both high urban temperatures and air pollutants. Hence, data at both fine scales associated with green infrastructure and regional scales are needed to evaluate these practices and to augment the value of satellite products in their applications. Understanding how well existing environmental networks represent neighborhood and regional spatial variability and the extent to which satellite data can be used to characterize such variability requires a holistic approach that integrates citizen science observations into the analysis of satellite data and numerical modeling. Here we propose to develop a new data-model system that couples remotely sensed air, climate, and land cover data with a new dense network of climate and air quality sensors maintained by a cadre of citizen scientists. These data-sources will be used to together with the WRF-chem atmospheric transport and chemistry model to analyze and interpret intra-urban variability of environmental risk and the role of vegetation in mitigating this risk. Outputs from the project will include neighborhood-scale distributions of climate and air quality for greater LOS angeles CA at the satellite subpixel level, scenarios of land cover change induced changes to air quality and climate distributions, and a prototype operational system to provide predictive estimates of neighborhood scale climate air quality. During the pilot phase we will develop a prototype system for long beach, CA, a subset of the LOS angeles megapolitan region with severe nonattainment of O3. During the implementation phase we will develop the full data-model system for the entire LOS angeles, CA megapolitan region over two summer periods. During the second summer period the sensor network will be reconfigured to allow placement of nodes that best fill existing uncertainties from the first year. Using improved modeling of local land cover, especially vegetation fraction, effects on climate and O3, through the combination of satellite, an in-situ sensor network, and WRF-chem modeling we will conduct predictive modeling exercises that evaluate vegetation change scenarios and look toward 48 hour forecasts. The project builds upon the proposal teams past collaborative work of citizescience network and research in LOS angeles megapolitan region as well as the use of in situ data, satellite data and chemistry transport model to study the effect of land use on O3. The project will also be in collaboration with algorithm developer for tropospheric O3 from OMI and tempo and be leveraged with existing projects as part of hyspri mission, thereby having important implications for using citizen sciences data for urban climate and air quality studies from a future satellite mission perspective.