New AI-assisted Climate Study Reveals What Urban Heat Really Feels Like
Category: Sustainable Infrastructure
iSEE Transportation Project Installs Free EV Stations to Study Charging Data
A sustainable transportation initiative supported by the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) is conducting an on-campus research project on electric vehicle (EV) charging as a part of its overall project plan. This three-part study will help gather direct user data related to EV charging on campus, using a readily available charging source: AC outlets.
Much of the emerging EV charging infrastructure discussion emphasizes fast charging, in which a battery pack recovers roughly half of its capacity in 20 to 30 minutes. Sometimes this is called Level 3 or DC fast charging; one vendor calls them “superchargers.” Level 3 infrastructure is inherently expensive, with upwards of $15,000 for devices and much more to add electrical capacity and connections. Users pay several times the cost of energy in exchange for speed. Fast chargers can be found along major highways.Most of the units now seen around campus are Level 2 devices, which support the typical internal EV charger to recharge the battery in two or three hours at power levels consistent with an electric oven or clothes dryer. These are also expensive – roughly $2,000 per unit. Users still need to pay a premium over the cost of energy to recover equipment and installation costs.
This study, in contrast, explores familiar, basic 120 V AC outlets as a charging infrastructure alternative. Sometimes called Level 1 charging, it takes many hours to recharge an EV battery from this basic infrastructure. On the other hand, commuters park their cars all day, so this duration is not necessarily a problem. The costs match the retail cost of electrical energy, since the infrastructure does not impose any special requirements.
In the first phase, the iSEE project team has designed data collection hardware to obtain charging data for basic infrastructure charging, with emphasis on commuters holding parking permits and parking all day. The team is working with Campus Parking and Facilities & Services to support the deployment of this data collection capability in Lot B4, the North Campus Parking Structure, to gather initial data in phase one.
For the initial tests, eight parking spaces dispersed throughout Lot B4 have been set up with metered receptacles. Parking clients simply park, plug in with their own cables, and charge their EVs at no added cost.
The iSEE budget is covering all setup costs and energy cost during the study. The eight units will be in position for about eight weeks, gathering data in one-minute intervals about current, voltage, power, and energy. The iSEE team will download data approximately weekly. The collection units have sufficient internal storage for the entire test duration. There is no cost to users and no personal data is collected.
Phase two of the project will involve about 30 data collection boxes dispersed around campus. This phase will trial management and pricing plans that will help make future programs convenient for users and financially sustainable. As future phases of the experiment begin, this page will be updated.
Project FAQs
How can I participate in this program?
Any permit holder in Lot B4 with a plug-in vehicle can park in one of the designated spaces and connect to the data collection box on a first-come first-served basis. Each space will be marked with a sign. There are no costs, signup requirements, or special requirements. Just park and plug in. The number of spaces is limited (eight), and we apologize for limited availability.
Will my personal data be collected? What data are you collecting?
The units collect and record electrical data (voltage, current, power, energy) and time of day. No other information is collected, no information about vehicles will be gathered, and no personal data is measured or recorded.
What equipment do I need to charge in B4?
Most electrical vehicles are equipped with a “convenience charge cable” that can plug into a standard 120 V receptacle. This is the only need.
Where are each of these parking spots in B4?
The parking spaces are dispersed across the B4 levels for permit holders. Three are on level 2, two are on level 3, one is on level 4, and two are in the area designated for student parking leading to level 5.
Can I park in this charging spot all day?
Yes, there are no restrictions on duration.
Is it safe to charge my car with this system?
The charge source is a standard 120 V receptacle. The internal data collection equipment is isolated from the power flow, so the safety is the same as for standard outlets.
Can I charge my scooter in these spots?
Lot B4 is not authorized for scooter parking. This program is for vehicle permit holders.
Rain Barrel Basics: Conserving Water but not Mosquito Habitats
As people look to reduce their water use for environmental and ecological reasons, rain barrels have gained popularity for catching rainwater that can be stored and used for irrigation. These green infrastructure tools can conserve hundreds of gallons of water per year and reduce stormwater runoff. However, as a source of standing water, improperly maintained rain barrels may also be comfortable homes for juvenile mosquitoes.
In their new paper, published in the Journal of Medical Entomology, researchers at the University of Illinois surveyed residential rain barrels around Champaign County to determine how often mosquitoes took up residence in rain barrels and what preventative measures would most effectively keep mosquitoes out.
Not only are mosquitoes annoying, they are also vectors of many dangerous diseases, such as West Nile virus. These mosquito-borne diseases continue to pose a threat to public health in part because of the prevalence of human-made mosquito habitat in urban and residential areas. Juvenile mosquitoes require standing water to develop in, and some of these water sources come from our own backyards.
“Rain barrels are an excellent tool for homeowners to help in reducing water use,” said Brian Allan, Principal Investigator on the study and Professor of Entomology at the University of Illinois. “But they hadn’t been carefully evaluated yet as a potential habitat for mosquitoes.”
Although other forms of green stormwater infrastructure such as rain gardens and infiltration catch basins may reduce mosquito presence, the Illinois research team hypothesized that rain barrels could serve as habitat for mosquitoes.
This hypothesis was supported when their residential survey of 115 rain barrels at 53 households around Champaign County between June and September 2016 found that over half of the households had at least one mosquito-positive rain barrel.
The survey collected information about each of the rain barrels, including the types of mosquito prevention techniques they used, if any. The researchers’ statistical analysis revealed that mosquitoes were less likely to be found in rain barrels that had a mesh covering over the lid of the barrel, which helps physically keep mosquitoes out. In addition, many vector control specialists recommend treating container habitats with approved mosquito prevention methods, such as the bacterial insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti), chlorine, or even predators of mosquito larvae such as goldfish. Analysis of the researchers’ survey results indicated that these three water treatment methods were also effective forms of mosquito prevention.
Along with the rain barrels themselves, the researchers also surveyed the homeowners’ knowledge of best practices for mosquito prevention. While most homeowners could identify short-term mosquito prevention methods such as dumping out water from their rain barrels, few were aware of long-term methods of prevention such as utilizing a mesh covering or an insecticide.
“Our findings confirmed that there are simple solutions for reducing mosquito habitat, though these solutions require homeowner education and compliance,” said Becky Cloud, first author on the paper and graduate student in the Program in Ecology, Evolution & Conservation Biology (PEEC) in the School of Integrative Biology at the University of Illinois.
It is crucial that current and future rain barrel owners are empowered to take the proper precautions to prevent mosquitoes from spawning in their barrels, which will mitigate both the nuisance of mosquito bites and the risk of vector-borne disease spread. Accessible community outreach programs held by educational institutions, public health districts, and mosquito abatement districts have the potential to play a crucial role in preparing homeowners to take appropriate steps to mosquito-proof their rain barrels.
Taking these preventative measures will reduce potential health risks and ensure that rain barrels remain a safe, effective, and environmentally sustainable tool for managing stormwater runoff.
Other co-authors on this study include Andrew Mackay, Associate Scientist at the Illinois Natural History Survey; Maeli Sanchez, formerly an undergraduate student in the School of Integrative Biology; and Catherine Wangen, formerly a lab technician in the Department of Entomology.
— News release by iSEE Communications Specialist April Wendling
iSEE Transportation Project Installs Free EV Stations to Study Charging Data
A sustainable transportation initiative supported by the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) is conducting an on-campus research project on electric vehicle (EV) charging as a part of its overall project plan. This three-part study will help gather direct user data related to EV charging on campus, using a readily available charging source: AC outlets.
Much of the emerging EV charging infrastructure discussion emphasizes fast charging, in which a battery pack recovers roughly half of its capacity in 20 to 30 minutes. Sometimes this is called Level 3 or DC fast charging; one vendor calls them “superchargers.” Level 3 infrastructure is inherently expensive, with upwards of $15,000 for devices and much more to add electrical capacity and connections. Users pay several times the cost of energy in exchange for speed. Fast chargers can be found along major highways.Most of the units now seen around campus are Level 2 devices, which support the typical internal EV charger to recharge the battery in two or three hours at power levels consistent with an electric oven or clothes dryer. These are also expensive – roughly $2,000 per unit. Users still need to pay a premium over the cost of energy to recover equipment and installation costs.
This study, in contrast, explores familiar, basic 120V AC outlets as a charging infrastructure alternative. Sometimes called Level 1 charging, it takes many hours to recharge an EV battery from this basic infrastructure. On the other hand, commuters park their cars all day, so this duration is not necessarily a problem. The costs match the retail cost of electrical energy, since the infrastructure does not impose any special requirements.
In the first phase, the iSEE project team has designed data collection hardware to obtain charging data for basic infrastructure charging, with emphasis on commuters holding parking permits and parking all day. The team is working with Campus Parking and Facilities & Services to support the deployment of this data collection capability in Lot B4, the North Campus Parking Structure, to gather initial data in phase one.
For the initial tests, eight parking spaces dispersed throughout Lot B4 have been set up with metered receptacles. Parking clients simply park, plug in with their own cables, and charge their EVs at no added cost.
The iSEE budget is covering all setup costs and energy cost during the study. The eight units will be in position for about eight weeks, gathering data in one-minute intervals about current, voltage, power, and energy. The iSEE team will download data approximately weekly. The collection units have sufficient internal storage for the entire test duration. There is no cost to users and no personal data is collected.
Phase two of the project will involve about 30 data collection boxes dispersed around campus. This phase will trial management and pricing plans that will help make future programs convenient for users and financially sustainable. As future phases of the experiment begin, this page will be updated.
Project FAQs
How can I participate in this program?
Any permit holder in lot B4 with a plug-in vehicle can park in one of the designated spaces and connect to the data collection box on a first-come first-served basis. Each space will be marked with a sign. There are no costs, signup requirements, or special requirements. Just park and plug in. The number of spaces is limited (eight), and we apologize for limited availability.
Will my personal data be collected? What data are you collecting?
The units collect and record electrical data (voltage, current, power, energy) and time of day. No other information is collected, no information about vehicles will be gathered, and no personal data is measured or recorded.
What equipment do I need to charge in B4?
Most electrical vehicles are equipped with a “convenience charge cable” that can plug into a standard 120 V receptacle. This is the only need.
Where are each of these parking spots in B4?
The parking spaces are dispersed across the B4 levels for permit holders. Three are on level 2, two are on level 3, one is on level 4, and two are in the area designated for student parking leading to level 5.
Can I park in this charging spot all day?
Yes, there are no restrictions on duration.
Is it safe to charge my car with this system?
The charge source is a standard 120 V receptacle. The internal data collection equipment is isolated from the power flow, so the safety is the same as for standard outlets.
Can I charge my scooter in these spots?
Lot B4 is not authorized for scooter parking. This program is for vehicle permit holders.
Urban Heating, Cooling to Play Major Role in Energy Demand, Climate Change
Existing global energy projections underestimate the impact of climate change on urban heating and cooling systems by roughly 50% by 2099 if greenhouse gas emissions remain high, researchers report. This disparity could profoundly affect critical sustainable energy planning for the future.
Existing studies predominantly concentrate on chemical feedback loops, which are large-scale processes involving complex interactions between energy use, greenhouse gas emissions and the atmosphere. However, a research group at Illinois focuses on the often-overlooked physical interactions between urban infrastructure and the atmosphere that can contribute to local microclimates and, ultimately, global climate.
A new study led by Lei Zhao, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, emphasizes that smaller-scale city-level waste heat from residential and commercial property heating and cooling efforts can lead to big impacts on local climates and energy use. The study findings are published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Zhao’s research was seed-funded by iSEE to help climate scientists model the dynamics between climate change and urbanization — and inform policymkers and planners of potential climate solutions.
iSEE Funds Two Start-up Projects
An interdisciplinary proposal for a “Future Metropolis Initiative” — to address urban climate threats and make cities more sustainable — has been awarded a two-year, $50,000 planning grant from the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE).
Additionally, iSEE has awarded $30,000 in seed funding for an interdisciplinary proposal to examine the economic and human health effects of exposure to wildfire smoke on a broad scale, to help inform climate policy.
The awards are part of iSEE’s program to seed-fund multidisciplinary research, visioning, and planning activities on ambitious topics related to sustainability, energy, and environment. The goal is to support the development of strong proposals that will attract larger external grants of $1 million or more.
“Researchers from across campus are tackling climate change issues at many different levels, from advancing our understanding of causes and effects to policy evaluations and the development of technologies to support climate mitigation, helping address emerging challenges and new realities,” said Jeremy Guest, iSEE Associate Director for Research. “With iSEE seed funding, our teams will integrate concepts and tools from across disciplines to compete for larger grants.”
The Future Metropolis Initiative, led by Civil and Environmental Engineering Assistant Professor Lei Zhao, is designed to tackle the complexity of climate change and its cascading effects on cities. Occupying just 2% to 3% of the Earth’s land surface, cities house more than 50% of the world’s population and contribute to about 75% of carbon emissions from global energy use. Many climate-driven threats — such as extreme weather, water scarcity, and energy insecurity — are rooted in or exacerbated by the high population densities and infrastructure of urban centers. Absent measures to understand and ameliorate these risks, they are expected to intensify with rapid urban development.
The Future Metropolis Initiative will bring together an interdisciplinary team of experts in climate, the built environment, health, energy, transportation, policy, and human and community behavior — coupled with innovative geographical information systems, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and computational and data science solutions — to build an integrated platform addressing the Grand Challenges facing cities in a holistic, equitable way.
“With this planning grant from iSEE, we can begin to build a transformative and integrated system that is both science-driven and solution-oriented to foresee climate risks in cities, to foster innovative urban solutions, and to advance global sustainable growth,” Zhao said.
The wildfire proposal is led by Agricultural and Consumer Economics Assistant Professor Andrew Hultgren, who has done previous work assessing the impact of climate change on global agricultural yields. Research has demonstrated that wildfires are increasing in size and cost, with far-reaching implications for human health and the economy; further, climate change has been linked to increased exposure to wildfires. To date, however, no study has examined all of those factors combined, at either a regional or global scale, leaving a “critical gap” in our understanding of the social and economic impacts of climate change and policies needed to address them, Hultgren said.
“This project will lay the foundation for a multidisciplinary research agenda that can close this gap and potentially feed directly into U.S. environmental policy,” Hultgren said. “iSEE’s funding is critical to building out our capacity to quantify the social impacts of a changing wildfire regime under future warming — information that can be used by local, regional, and national policymakers in their climate policy decision-making.”
— News release by iSEE Communications Specialist Julie Wurth
iSEE Funds Sustainable Low-Carbon Transportation Research Initiative!
There is a pressing global need to ensure the efficiency, sustainability, and resilience of transportation systems for both urban and rural communities. Transporting people and goods with fossil-fueled vehicles has long been recognized as unsustainable for most communities — but different communities will face different challenges. From electric vehicles to ride-sharing services, our transportation systems continue to evolve, and these new developments demand new research.
To this end, interdisciplinary experts at the University of Illinois are working together to investigate fundamental questions about infrastructure design and planning, energy sources, integration of transportation across multiple modes, public policy, and regulation.
The project, Sustainable Low-Carbon Alternatives for Meeting Mobility Needs of Urban and Rural Communities, aims to provide a grand vision and detailed engineering guidelines for next-generation decarbonized transportation systems. The vision and guidelines aim at serving the mobility needs of both urban and rural communities, and ensuring coupled clean energy supply for agricultural production, industry operations, and residential buildings, over the next 10-20 years.
iSEE is supporting the project with $300,000 — part of a $1 million anonymous gift that the Institute is designating for sustainability research initiatives.
“We are pleased to invest in research into holistic, next-generation transportation systems that sustainably and equitably serve the mobility needs of both urban and rural communities,” said Madhu Khanna, iSEE’s Alvin H. Baum Family Chair and Director. “This new project will address a range of open questions related to infrastructure design and planning, energy sources, transportation service integration, emission reductions and other environmental impacts, the economic and behavioral incentives to adopt alternative transportation modes, and the design of policies needed to accelerate this transformation.
“We are particularly excited to have Civil & Environmental Engineering Professor Yanfeng Ouyang lead an interdisciplinary team that will grow our research program in this area with a potential for attracting external funding.”
The team will focus on two initial efforts that will form a solid foundation for future work:
- Investigating ways of planning for ubiquitous and equitable access to electric vehicle charging in rural areas and small towns, and assessing community-level impacts. The proposed effort will prepare pilot programs for low-cost charging access in a variety of locations, at scales of hundreds of units.
- Conducting small-scale experiments on alternative mobility services and pricing strategies for communities (specifically Rantoul and Champaign-Urbana). Team members will investigate how mobility service needs can be fulfilled in low-density rural areas with different options for different prices and wait times.
“Partnering with iSEE on this project has given us many valuable opportunities,” said Ouyang, who is the George Krambles Endowed Professor of Rail and Public Transit and also serves as Associate Director for Mobility at the Illinois Center for Transportation. “They’re supporting us not only with start-up funding for team building and for laying our foundational plans, but also by setting up roundtables with local industry and community leaders who are at the frontier of the sustainable mobility space.”
Ouyang’s co-PIs are Julie Cidell, Professor and Department Head of Geography & Geographic Information Science; Ria Kontou, Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering; Philip Krein, Grainger Endowed Chair Emeritus in Electric Machinery and Electromechanics in Electrical & Computer Engineering; Lewis Lehe, Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering; and Moses Okumu, Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work.
One of the first activities being organized by co-PIs connected with this project is a May 16-17, 2024, workshop titled “Envisioning Equitable Transitions to Sustainable Transportation Systems.” A diverse group of researchers, educators, industry professionals, and activists will discuss urgent questions about transitioning to low-carbon transportation systems — whatever they might be — while addressing the needs of all populations regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic standing.
The conference is jointly organized by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and is supported by generous funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
— News release by April Wendling, iSEE Communications Specialist
Climate Change and Urbanization: Team Employs New Modeling Framework
With climate change driving temperature increases, water scarcity, and limited access to energy in urban areas, it has become more important than ever to understand the relationships between urban areas and their resources.
Lei Zhao, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois, works with a team of engineers and climate scientists to model the dynamics between climate change and urbanization. Their research, which has received seed funding from iSEE, helps inform policymakers and urban planners of potential climate solutions.
The software currently used by scientists to predict climate conditions and model land, ocean, and atmospheric dynamics, called the Earth Systems Modeling framework, may be underrepresenting urban environments. Zhao describes it as a “legacy issue,” in which the happenings in an urban environment are too small to cause any discernible changes in large-scale dynamics that traditional models were designed to capture. Additionally, because of the great heterogeneity of urban environments, specific details are often overlooked.
“Chicago is different from New York City. New York City is different from San Francisco. The textures and forms of those cities are not the same,” Zhao said.
There’s a common misconception about the availability of urban climate data. Urban weather stations are not placed in areas that are truly representative of the city’s environment.
“People might think urban environments are very data-rich, but in terms of climatology or meteorology, they’re not,” Zhao said. “When you walk into the city center, you’ll seldom see a weather station there. It’s typically in the airport or in some park, which doesn’t represent urban environments.”
Placing observational sites in truly urban areas causes logistical issues. In the city center, citizens prefer shopping malls and other recreational buildings over weather stations. So the lack of documentation from city centers causes a gap in research between the urban landscape and observational and modeling processes.
To address this, engineers and climate scientists are researching how to use process-based climate modeling and machine learning/artificial intelligence approaches to produce a simulation of climate dynamics that is representative of real urban landscapes. The new hybrid modeling framework leverages the few models that capture urban dynamics and integrates their fully coupled simulations with a physics-informed machine-learning approach.
Together, they provide global multi-model projections of local urban climates under different climate change scenarios, with an assessment of the associated robustness and uncertainties. With this framework, when public health or climate interventionists want to initiate change, they can use a model that is precise to the city of interest.
It’s an unfortunate reality in urban engineering that sustainability sometimes conflicts with resilience. Zhao warns that researchers must aim to strike a balance between strategies that make efficient use of energy and strategies that make cities more resilient to hazards and extremes.
Thankfully, many urban infrastructure experts have spearheaded efforts to prevent cities from being major sources of greenhouse gases while still prioritizing high-quality infrastructure. Zhao notes that targeting urban areas in particular may be the most effective way toward a sustainable future: “75% of final energy use is from cities. They’re hotspots of emission, even though they’re only 2-3% of the land. If we don’t act on cities, we won’t have a sustainable future.”
This urban hybrid modeling project is highly interdisciplinary, featuring a team of experts from different fields. Collaboration between atmospheric scientists and civil engineers helps bring the urban systems model to a broader scale. The two teams have weekly discussions about their research, some of which have led to other urban-related sustainability and climate pursuits.
“Our team has grown,” Zhao said. “For example, this project has led to a larger grant to explore how the wind and concentration of heat in the cities affects mosquitoes, and then how that affects dengue disease.”
When it comes to current research successes, Zhao highlights his students and postdocs and their work on urban humid heat stress (Joyce Yang), urban climate-energy interactions (Cathy Li), urban green stormwater infrastructure (Laura Gray), and global urban data and modeling development (Bowen Fang, Yifan Cheng, and Yiwen Zhang).
“Some of our students are working on nature-based solutions,” he said. “One of those solutions, green stormwater infrastructure, was designed for water infiltration and reduced flooding, but it has other co-benefits. Those benefits are what we are trying to evaluate.”
A long-term goal of this research is to advance global urban science, and consequently, global sustainability.
“I hope to build an advanced understanding of global science that is both fundamental and solution-oriented,” Zhao said.
The research team hopes that these findings will help inform decision-making policies and enable climate-sensitive urban design and engineering. Although cities are currently notorious for being energy-costly, pathogenic hotspots, accurate urban modeling can help transform them into resilient, sustainable, and livable spaces for generations to come.
— Article by iSEE Communications Intern Anjali Yedavalli
I-GUIDE Team Examines the Vulnerability of Dams across the United States
It’s no secret that big environmental problems tend to require interdisciplinary solutions. In the case of monitoring the risks that aging dam infrastructure imposes, storm watchers, engineers, and sociologists all have a part to play.
Deanna Hence, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois, aids in the intercollegiate Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) efforts to put a spotlight on the effects of fragile dams on nearby populations.
With global climate change resulting in unpredictable and extreme patterns of rainfall, dams in the United States are in a vulnerable state. Heavily aged dams are at an even greater risk of succumbing to the effects of extreme weather. As such, dam failure has become a prevalent issue, endangering communities located underneath the infrastructure.
“As I-GUIDE was coming together, it was identified pretty quickly that when we’re thinking about problems of sustainability, our infrastructure and how resilient it is to climate change is a very, very chief concern for sustainability issues going into the future,” Hence said.
Researchers within the convergence science team at I-GUIDE analyze data related to the vulnerability of water infrastructure due to climate change. They look for characteristics about their status, how well they have been maintained, and any geographical features that make them particularly vulnerable to climate extremes.
Dams protect and provide for communities. They are built to help prevent flooding, supply drinking water, and control water flow. I-GUIDE researchers access a database sourcing dams from all over the country and overlay it with global weather and climate data through statistics and other advanced computation tools.
“This (project) is not only looking at how these weather and climate patterns are spread across the country and how frequently they occur, but also how these patterns are changing with time,” Hence said. “It covers both the spatial component and also the temporal component.”
Some of the most critical findings on this project come from statistics experts Adam Tonks, Bo Li, Jeongwoo Hwang, and Upmani Lall from the University of Illinois, Carolina State University, and Columbia University. They discovered the variation in risk of dam failure associated with one-day, 30-day, and compound precipitation events. Thirty-day events are defined by moderate periods of rainfall (with “moderate” defined as a rainfall event that alone would not cause dam failure), whereas one-day events are a single extreme period of rainfall. Researchers found that the combination of the two is what led to the most dam failures, aligning with previously established theories that climate change intensifies the frequency of extreme weather events.
Using these computational models, I-GUIDE members highlight different regions of the country where there is a high concentration of vulnerable dams in hopes that the information can be used by decision-makers. Some subsequent intervention mechanisms include repairing, replacing, or removing dams.
Additionally, I-GUIDE focuses heavily on the socioeconomic dimension of the aging stormwater infrastructure data. Social scientists Courtney Flint, Bailey Holdaway, Kwaku Opoku-Ware, and Jinwoo Park from Utah State University and the University of Illinois found that communities located in more socioeconomically disadvantaged areas have greater risks associated with aging dam infrastructure. However, this pattern is highly region-specific, and some parts of the country are more mixed in terms of socioeconomic development and dam risk. Some areas considered hotspots of risk for socioeconomically disadvantaged communities include parts of California, Colorado, New Mexico, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.
“It does vary across the country,” Hence said. “It’s one of those things where saying an overarching result for the entire country is a bit difficult. But hopefully, that information can help inform decision-makers, especially for the regions most at risk.”
A large quantity of data collection is required for such an interdisciplinary project. A concept pioneered by I-GUIDE researchers at Illinois called the geospatial knowledge hypercube was designed to provide a structure for integrating geospatial data together. The hypercube helps reduce the manual labor involved with tagging individual pieces of data and package information in ways that are more easily accessible for analysis. More efforts are needed to provide tools to researchers that can engage in high-performance computing, such as building connectors to be able to use Jupyter Notebook in accessible locations.
Hence and her team’s work specifically focuses on the atmospheric behavior associated with the patterns identified by statistical analyses. Weather and climate models are used to identify “warning signs” of precipitation that are likely to break a dam. University of Illinois Atmospheric Sciences Ph.D. student Hodo Orok leads efforts to identify weather systems behind these critical precipitation events.
With the effects of climate change increasingly rampant, it is more important than ever for scientists of all disciplines to work together. Hence advocates for multiple viewpoints when it comes to issues regarding sustainability and infrastructure. “I think one of the biggest things about this project is that it shows both the importance and the power of bringing many, many disciplines together to look at a particular problem. It means that we can get so much further in really understanding the nature of the problem.”
To learn more about the Vulnerability Analysis of Aging Dam Infrastructure project, check out its page on the I-GUIDE website >>>
— Article by iSEE Communications Intern Anjali Yedavalli
