WUDAPT: Facilitating advanced urban canopy modeling for weather, climate and air quality applications

Environmental issues and impacts to society will be exacerbated with increased population, diminishing resources and the prospects for extreme weather events and climate changes. Current community-based models available for weather, climate and air quaity applications are powerful state-of-science modeling systems, which, with careful considerations, can be employed to address the impact of these issues fo urban areas. Given the complex and high degree of spatial inhomogeneity of the underlying surface area we will review mesh size, appropriate multi-scale science and morphological descriptions and their data requirements including unique city specific gridded morphology and material composition for their forecasting and climate applications. For this presentation, we discuss, describe and show examples from an ongoing but preliminary prototypic collaborative effort, whose design bases is to provide the experience and recommendations toward extending the scope of the National Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (NUDAPT) to worldwide coverage (WUDAPT). WUDAPT would thus provide requisite gridded data for urban applications of advanced forecast and climate models throughout the world. Strategically, the prototypic efforts will be designed to provide proven protocols for the facilitaton of the data gathering and processing based on available remote sensing and ground-based sampling. Tactically, we employ an iterative approach first obtaining coarse gridded Local Climate Zone (LCZ) classification derived from available Web-based products such as Google-Earth, and Landsat satellite magery. Further sub-class discretization of LCZs and the application of GeoWiki technology facilitates further refinements and ground truthing to yield the desired gridded building morphological distribution parameters and their material composition. Local experts would be encouraged to become involved to ensure factors unique to their area in the world would be incorporated. Finally, given that model applications may require data with different grid resolution we present an outline that employs the new and powerful Multiple Resolution Analyses scheme that can address this need within the scope of WUDAPT

WUDAPT: an urban weather, climate and environmental modeling infrastructure for the Anthropocene

WUDAPT is an international community-based initiative to acquire and disseminate climate relevant data on the physical geographies of cities for modeling and analyses purposes. The current lacuna of globally consistent information on cities is a major impediment to urban climate science towards informing and developing climate mitigation and adaptation strategies at urban scales. WUDAPT consists of a database and a portal system; its database is structured into a hierarchy representing different levels of detail and the data are acquired using innovative protocols that utilize crowdsourcing approaches, Geowiki tools, freely accessible data, and building typology archetypes. The base level of information (L0) consists of Local Climate Zones (LCZ) maps of cities; each LCZ category is associated with range of values for model relevant surface descriptors (e.g. roughness, impervious surface cover, roof area, building heights, etc.). Levels 1 (L1) and 2 (L2) will provide specific intraurban values for other relevant descriptors at greater precision, such as data morphological forms, material composition data and energy usage. This article describes the status of the WUDAPT project and demonstrates its potential value using observations and models. As a community-based project, other researchers are encouraged to participate to help create a global urban database of value to urban climate scientists

Pathway using WUDAPT's Digital Synthetic City tool towards generating urban canopy parameters for multi-scale urban atmospheric modeling

The WUDAPT (World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools project goal is to capture consistent information on urban form and function for cities worldwide that can support urban weather, climate, hydrology and air quality modeling. These data are provided as urban canopy parameters (UCPs) as used by weather, climate and air quality models to simulate the effects of urban surfaces on the overlying atmosphere. Information is stored with different levels of detail (LOD). With higher LOD greater spatial precision is provided. At the lowest LOD, Local Climate Zones(LCZ) with nominal UCP ranges is provided (order 100 m or more). To describe the spatial heterogeneity present in cities with great specificity at different urban scales we introduce the Digital Synthetic City (DSC) tool to generate UCPs at any desired scale meeting the fit-for-purpose goal of WUDAPT. 3D building and road elements of entire city landscapes are simulated based on readily available data. Comparisons with real-world urban data are very encouraging. It is customized (C-DSC) to incorporate each city's unique building morphologies based on unique types, variations and spatial distribution of building typologies, architecture features, construction materials and distribution of green and pervious surfaces. The C-DSC uses crowdsourcing methods and sampling within city Testbeds from around the world. UCP data can be computed from synthetic images at selected grid sizes and stored such that the coded string provides UCP values for individual grid cells

CXCR4 identifies transitional bone marrow premonocytes that replenish the mature monocyte pool for peripheral responses

It is well established that Ly6C(hi) monocytes develop from common monocyte progenitors (cMoPs) and reside in the bone marrow (BM) until they are mobilized into the circulation. In our study, we found that BM Ly6C(hi) monocytes are not a homogenous population, as current data would suggest. Using computational analysis approaches to interpret multidimensional datasets, we demonstrate that BM Ly6C(hi) monocytes consist of two distinct subpopulations (CXCR4(hi) and CXCR4(lo) subpopulations) in both mice and humans. Transcriptome studies and in vivo assays revealed functional differences between the two subpopulations. Notably, the CXCR4(hi) subset proliferates and is immobilized in the BM for the replenishment of functionally mature CXCR4(lo) monocytes. We propose that the CXCR4(hi) subset represents a transitional premonocyte population, and that this sequential step of maturation from cMoPs serves to maintain a stable pool of BM monocytes. Additionally, reduced CXCR4 expression on monocytes, upon their exit into the circulation, does not reflect its diminished role in monocyte biology. Specifically, CXCR4 regulates monocyte peripheral cellular activities by governing their circadian oscillations and pulmonary margination, which contributes toward lung injury and sepsis mortality. Together, our study demonstrates the multifaceted role of CXCR4 in defining BM monocyte heterogeneity and in regulating their function in peripheral tissues