CCNY Students with NOAA Design NYC Weather Trackers to Combat Climate Change Around the City
By Aspasia Celia Tsampas
The following article was featured in the February 2020 edition of The Campus.
The City College of New York based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Center for Earth System Sciences and Remote Sensing Technologies (NOAA CESSRST) and the CUNY CREST Institute, a research facility for remote sensing earth systems, has established nineteen autonomous mini-meteorological stations scattered around various boroughs of New York City.
This achievement is part of City College’s response to therising sea levels and increased extreme weather conditions in the city causedby climate change, as outlined by the NYC Governments report “CoolNeighborhoods NYC: A Comprehensive Approach to Keep Communities Safe in ExtremeHeat.”
Led by students and faculty at CCNY, the project is referredto as New York Urban Hydrometeorological Testbed, or NY-uHMT. According to theNew York City Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency, this system is a oneof a kind high-density hydro-meteorological network.
The system will help answer many questions about the climatein the New York City area in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, heat-relatedhealth risks in neighborhoods, and more ways to make New York City resilient.
The NY-uHMT is designed to monitor basic meteorological andhydrological variables to assess the variability in the city’s microclimatesand their response to extreme events. Some research objectives include mappingthe ground and atmospheric conditions to detect and forecast severe weatherevents (such as wind, tornados, hail, ice, and flash floods), improve theaccuracy and time measurement of these weather events to progress predictionsand warnings in the boroughs, and develop models for federal/municipal/privatepartnerships for educational outreach to NYC schools with NOAA CESSRST and theCUNY CREST Institute.
Sites of the NY-uHMT include the Polo Grounds Towers inHarlem near the City College campus, as well as all around the boroughs at JHSHigh School in Brooklyn, the Queens Botanical Garden, the Brownsville Branch ofthe Brooklyn Public Library, and the Dyckman Houses.
All data produced by the stations will be available and open to the general public and researchers through the center’s website (which you can check out with the QR Code to the right).
