JFF Dan Li Leads Study on City Climate Change
Junior Faculty Fellow Dan Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environment, is paving the way for study on urban heat islands as important indicators of climate change. As BU Today reports, Li and undergraduate student Yaofeng Gu (CAS ’17), a participant in the Undergraduate Research Opporunities Program (UROP), are testing a new climate model that will include urban areas in assessing climate change. In the past, computers have not had sufficient power to test climate models in urban centers. Cities and urban areas, however, often indicate how climate change will affect other areas, as over half the world’s population lives in cities. Li and Gu’s work will help climate change models move forward, providing more accurate information, and allowing for better understanding of the “heat island” problem, where cities tend to be centers of heat.
In October 2016, Li gave a talk as a part of the Hariri Institute’s Wednesdays@Hariri/Meet Our Fellows series, which gave an overview of the effect changing climates have on local policies. His talk, From Global Climate Change to Local Policy Decisions, also chronicles the ever-mounting problem of climate change, the influence city climates have on climate models, and potential actions to tackle the issue. Li’s research is supported by the Hariri Institute, which awarded Li, Lucy Hutyra, and Mark Friedl (professors in the Department of Earth & Environment) a grant to pursue their study on urban heat islands in January 2016. The research looks at Boston’s heat islands and aims to use the data to create new climate models that will employ various situations including land use, energy use, and vegetation cover.
Li and Gu’s work has come far enough to simulate climate models anywhere in the continental US, which gives an idea of what the temperature might be in any given area, urban or rural. The project, developed for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, will help the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as it aims to look at research in relation to climate change. The international organization is the international leading body on climate change and its environmental and socioeconomic effects.