Abstract
Cities are where major human-perceived climate change impacts occur. Many globally recognized climate threats such as heat stress, water scarcity, air pollution, energy shortage, extreme rainfall, and flooding are either rooted from or exacerbated by the unique urban climatology combined with the concentrated population and infrastructure. These hazardous risks are projected to be further worsen due to climate change coupled with rapid urbanization. Effective urban planning and adaptation for climate-driven risks relies on robust climate modeling that are specific to built landscapes with quantitative characterization of uncertainties. Such projections, however, are largely absent because of a near-universal lack of urban representation in global-scale Earth system models. In this seminar, I will present a newly developed urban climate emulator framework that combines process-based Earth system modeling and data-driven Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML), and its applications on understanding the local urban climate change, variability, and uncertainty, and climate impacts to built environments at the global scale.
Bio
Lei Zhao is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and assistant professor affiliated with the National Center of Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research concerns the physical and engineering processes in the Atmospheric Boundary Layer where most human activities and environmental systems are concentrated, with a particular focus on built surfaces and urban environments. He combines theory, numerical modeling, remote sensing and in situ observations, and cutting-edge machine learning methods to study environmental fluid mechanics and land-atmosphere interaction that relate to urban environments, climatology and hydrology, climate change, climate impacts and adaptation. He is the recipient of a U.S. NSF CAREER Award. He received his Ph.D. in atmospheric physics from the School of the Environment at Yale University and the B.S. degree in Physics and Atmospheric Physics from Nanjing University in China. Before joining at UIUC, Lei was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University.
