Climate change coupled with urbanization represents the biggest challenge of our generation, nationally and globally. To address this key global grand challenge, IT is urgent to better understand…

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was awarded a $764,650 research grant by a civilian federal agency to address the intersection of urbanization and climate change through advanced Earth system modeling. The project aims to overcome three critical barriers limiting current climate adaptation and mitigation strategies: the lack of global high-resolution urban surface data for Earth system models, the inability to simulate dynamic urban land change in state-of-the-art models, and limited high-resolution modeling capabilities over urban landscapes. To accomplish this, the research team will leverage satellite observations and satellite-derived products to represent spatiotemporally continuous biophysical properties of urban areas, thereby advancing high-resolution urban modeling capabilities at large scales.

The grant, awarded May 1, 2025, with a completion deadline of April 30, 2028, represents a research initiative to transform cities from perceived problems into solutions that can shield urban residents from broader climate impacts. The contract carries no set-aside designation and funds fundamental research essential to improving scientific understanding of urbanization's effects on global climate systems. This work aligns with the federal government's prioritization of climate science and advanced modeling capabilities, supporting the development of tools necessary for effective climate adaptation and mitigation planning in rapidly urbanizing regions worldwide.

Climate change coupled with urbanization represents the biggest challenge of our generation, nationally and globally. To address this key global grand challenge, IT is urgent to better understand urban land cover land use change, its impacts on cities across the globe, and its interactions with climate systems across scales. Cities do not necessarily have to be a problem, but rather, should be a key to solutions, with the ability to shield urban residents from broader scale climate change. Realizing this goal, however, requires advanced data and tools, both to better understand urbanization and their impacts and for planning effective climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. Such tools, however, are largely lagging behind due to three critical barriers: (i) missing global highresolution urban surface constraints for earth system modeling, (II) inability to simulate dynamic urban land change in state-of-theart earth system models (esms), and (III) limited high-resolution modeling capabilities over urban landscapes in advanced esms and earth system digital twins (esdts). Here we propose to leverage a suite of satellite observations and satellite-derived products to represent spatiotemporally continuous biophysical properties of urban areas in earth system models to advance high-resolution urban modeling capabilities at large scales.