Dr. Katia Lamer: Filling Data Deserts to Understand Urban Airflow and Heat Mitigation
The Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP) at NYU Tandon welcomes you to attend a lecture Katia Lamer, an atmospheric scientist and the Director of the Center for Multiscale Applied Sensing at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This event will be held in 5 MetroTech, Room 400, at NYU Tandon's downtown Brooklyn Campus.
About the Lecture
Weather affects the stability of our energy grid, the safety of our cities, and the health of their inhabitants. Yet, we still know surprisingly little about how air flow and heat evolve within the complex geometry of real urban environments. Sparse observations and simplified urban weather models limit our ability to predict these interactions. To close this gap, the Brookhaven Lab has developed mobile observatories that capture high-resolution wind, and temperature data while driving within real cities.
Field deployments around the One Vanderbilt sky scrapper in New York City revealed how building shape and heat markedly modify wind patterns within urban street canyons highlighting the need to account for both thermal effects and building geometry in models to improve our ability to predict contaminant transport, optimize building energy use, and ensure safe operation of urban drones.
In Phoenix, field deployments documented the potential of irrigated green infrastructure as a heat mitigation strategy in an arid environment. Observations revealed nighttime 2 m air-temperature reductions up to 3.5 °C, extending roughly 160 m downwind of two 800 × 800 m parks. This cooling persisted overnight, its location changed with wind direction, and it weakened during the day. These measurements confirm that cooling is transported out of the parks in a way sufficient to benefit nearby houses, particularly during nighttime hours where residents are most vulnerable to heat. That said it also demonstrates that even large urban parks cannot cool down entire neighborhoods. This information can help guide heat-resilient urban design and sustainable water management in hot, dry regions.
Together, these studies demonstrate how mobile, multi-sensor field observations can link fine-scale atmospheric processes to societal outcomes, advancing our capacity to design safer, cooler, and more resilient cities in the face of geophysical hazards.
About the Speaker
Dr. Katia Lamer is an atmospheric scientist and the Director of the Center for Multiscale Applied Sensing at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Originally from Canada, she earned her B.S. and M.S. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Meteorology from Penn State University. Her research focuses on atmospheric boundary layer processes and remote sensing technologies, with a strong emphasis on data science. At Brookhaven, she is known for her work with the CMAS mobile observatories and its facility that connect fundamental atmospheric science to real-world applications, improving weather prediction, and urban resilience. Her work has been featured in public outlets such as New Scientist and Wired. Dr. Lamer also serves as an invited member of the World Meteorological Organization’s Data Assimilation and Observing Systems Working Group, and on the advisory board of the Wyoming King Air facility.
Visitor Information
This event will be held in 5 MetroTech, Room 400, at NYU Tandon's downtown Brooklyn Campus. Please visit the NYU Tandon website for directions and a campus map. Advance registration through Luma is required for campus access at NYU for external guests.