Claire Welty, CBEE (Department of Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering) and CUERE (Center for Urban Environmental Research & Education)
Mahdad Talebpour, CBEE and CUERE
The objective of this project is to develop the next-generation urban modeling system by integrating and further developing multiple state-of-the-art components. These components are existing models that have been previously developed by PIs at UMBC and Princeton to represent the atmospheric (WRF), surface (Urban Canopy Models-UCMs), and subsurface (ParFlow) urban environments. Through this project we will fully coupled them (yielding the first complete urban hydrological + meteorological model), as well as intensively develop their urban representations to capture important processes that are critical for understanding water challenges and how they interface with energy and climate challenges in cities. The coupled modeling framework will be applied to three test-bed cities (Baltimore, Denver, Portland). The overarching science question we aim to answer is: How do subsurface-surface-atmosphere connections vary across urban regions and during climatic extremes, and what are the implications for urban water sustainability?