Why urban heat?

Cities, situated at the crossroads of rising temperatures and growing populations, bear the brunt of climate change and must adapt to the new normal of extreme weather impacts. Today, we face both a unique opportunity and a timely responsibility to implement urban design interventions and adaptation strategies that will equip cities to withstand the impacts of climate change in the coming century. Our lab focuses on exploring innovative urban design and climate adaptation strategies to combat the growing threat of extreme heat, especially in rapidly developing cities.

Research Directions

We study how extreme heat emerges within cities, who it affects most, and how cities can adapt. Bringing together complexity science, urban climate modeling, and thermal remote sensing, our work spans a set of connected themes—and the projects below show how we put them into practice.

Intra-urban heat islets

Within a single city, some neighborhoods run several degrees hotter than others just a few blocks away. Using Land Surface Temperature, we showed that the intra-urban clusters of surface heat or 'heat islets' are statistically self-similar across diverse global cities, following fractal geometry and consistent scaling laws. The framework gives a common language for comparing very different cities and reveals how sprawling urban form can lower average temperatures while amplifying local extremes.

Mapping the Urban Form

How a city is built shapes the heat it holds. We characterize urban form at scale using the popular Local Climate Zone framework and develop new ways of capturing urban expansion and densification across diverse global cities. These tools turn the messy diversity of cities into consistent building blocks for urban climate analysis.

Climate Justice and Adaptation

Extreme heat falls hardest on lower-income communities shaped by decades of uneven investment. In Los Angeles, we trace how present-day income inequality and historical legacies like redlining drive intra-urban heat disparities, then turn that diagnosis into action by showing where cooling investments prevent the most heat deaths per dollar. The work translates directly into tools that support local decision-making, and thrives on partnerships with public-health experts, city agencies, and communities.

Heatwaves

Heatwaves are among the deadliest weather extremes, and cities amplify them unevenly, shifting depending on whether the air is dry or humid. Combining high-resolution weather modeling using WRF with satellite observations, we trace how these large scale events sweep across a city and who ends up most impacted.

Thermal Remote Sensing

To manage heat, cities first need to see it at the scale people actually feel it. We measure urban temperatures from the ground, from aircraft, and from space using instruments such as ECOSTRESS and airborne HyTES and develop detection algorithms for NASA's upcoming Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) mission that can pinpoint elevated thermal features such as wildfires just a few meters across.

Our work is supported by various funding agencies such as NASA and NYU internal grants.

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Where to go next

Publications→

See it in print

Peer-reviewed papers and reports from each direction.

People→

Who's behind the work

The researchers leading these directions.