1438324 (Gonzalez). This research has three objectives: a) investigate the environmental and energy sustainability of urbanized tropical coastal systems; b) engage and educate a broad audience on the sustainability of tropical coastal areas; and c) create new data sets, modeling tools and best practice guides for local stakeholders. The project will be led by the CUNY Remote Sensing Earth System Institute, based at the City College of New York (CCNY), in partnership with a long-term academic partner in Puerto Rico (University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez), joining efforts with NOAA, and local and regional stakeholders in the Caribbean and in Puerto Rico. It will be a trans-regional educational and training resource through developing data, products, and educational strategies to engage students and the general public on the subject of sustainability of sensitive tropical coastal regions. The program will be applied directly in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico and specifically in San Juan City, a coastal location that offers excellent opportunities for knowledge creation on energy and environmental sustainability. Tropical coastal areas contain almost one-third of the total world population and are highly vulnerable to Earth's changing climate. The rapid growth of these locations to accommodate growing populations and economic development is manifested in significant land use changes for urbanization. These two combined processes - climate change & urbanization- present a compounded risk to the well-being of the coupled human-natural system in these sensitive regions. This is the origin for this research effort guided by the fundamental science question: How is the energy sustainability of urbanized tropical coastal systems being modified by human interventions and climate change? Energy demands in tropical coastal regions are directly linked to warming environments due to the large demands from the built environment for human comfort.
In the research setting of the Caribbean, and in San Juan, Puerto Rico, there is clear evidence of a warming regional environment and local impacts of rapid urbanization. A multi-disciplinary observation and modeling framework will be organized in which regional climate records and global climate predictions are dynamically downscaled to the region of interest using high resolution regional climate models taking into consideration the surrounding ocean areas, and their interplay with the regional and local climate and landscape. The large scale coupling is extremely important to capture signals of the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans that result in Caribbean sea surface temperature modulation. The energy variable will be investigated with climate and energy records and using state-of-the-art building energy models at the city scale, coupled to the climate models. The modeling will be complemented by a regional and local data integration effort that will draw from existing environmental networks from multiple sources and from new data to be gathered from remote sensing capabilities to quantify environmental variables relevant to the energy activity. The detailed modeling approaches and integrated observations will be coupled with methodologies to involve key stakeholders.
