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.