Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Urban Studies and Planning Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Singapore Management University

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Series

Articles 1 - 30 of 41

Full-Text Articles in Urban Studies and Planning

“Fly Buddha To Mars”: The Co-Production Between Religiosity And Science & Technology At Longquan Monastery, Beijing, Han Zhang, Junxi Qian, Lily Kong Jan 2024

“Fly Buddha To Mars”: The Co-Production Between Religiosity And Science & Technology At Longquan Monastery, Beijing, Han Zhang, Junxi Qian, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article attempts at a re-theorization towards the symbiosis and co-production of religion, modern science and technology, inspired by theoretical thinking within geographies of religion and science and technology studies (STS). Recent scholarship on the geographies of religion has made substantive advancements in discerning the convergence of religion and secular modernity. However, science and technology (S&T), as an essential condition and driving force of secular modernity, remain peripheral to this ongoing theoretical agenda, yet to be fully incorporated into the analytical framework about the co-constitution of religion and secular modernity, arguably because of the entrench divide between the rationalism of …


A Holistic Blueprint For Sustainability Publication Outlet, Lily Kong May 2023

A Holistic Blueprint For Sustainability Publication Outlet, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Instead of compartmentalising decisions about infrastructure or resource allocation, universities need a whole-system approach to sustainability that shifts attitudes and behaviour, writes Lily Kong


A Climate Resilience Research Renewal Agenda: Learning Lessons From The Covid-19 Pandemic For Urban Climate Resilience, Mark Pelling, Winston T. L. Chow, Eric Chu, Richard Dawson, David Dodman, Arabella Fraser, Bronwyn Hayward, Luna Khirfan, Timon Mcphearson, Anjal Prakash, Gina Ziervogel Aug 2022

A Climate Resilience Research Renewal Agenda: Learning Lessons From The Covid-19 Pandemic For Urban Climate Resilience, Mark Pelling, Winston T. L. Chow, Eric Chu, Richard Dawson, David Dodman, Arabella Fraser, Bronwyn Hayward, Luna Khirfan, Timon Mcphearson, Anjal Prakash, Gina Ziervogel

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic opens an opportunity for enhanced research and action on inclusive urban resilience to climate change. Lessons and their implications are used to describe a climate resilience research renewal agenda. Three key lessons are identified. The first lesson is generic, that climate change risk coexists and interacts with other risks through overlapping social processes, conditions and decision-making contexts. Two further lessons are urban specific: that networks of connectivity bring risk as well as resilience and that overcrowding is a key indicator of the multiple determinants of vulnerability to both COVID-19 and climate change impacts. From …


Focus On Sustainable Cities: Urban Solutions Toward Desired Outcomes, M. Georgescu, M. Arabi, Winston T. L. Chow, E. Mack, K. C. Seto Nov 2021

Focus On Sustainable Cities: Urban Solutions Toward Desired Outcomes, M. Georgescu, M. Arabi, Winston T. L. Chow, E. Mack, K. C. Seto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Urbanization represents the single most impactful and long-lasting transformation of the Earth system since the dawn of civilization. Cities are simultaneously locations of innovation, social connectivity, and wealth, but they also create local-to-global environmental degradation and socioeconomic disparities. For example, food provision for cities has required significant land-use change and fertilizer input, has altered regional climate, biogeochemical cycles, and degraded marine and landscapes through biodiversity loss, algal blooms and fish kills. To maintain urban livelihoods and the provision of goods and services, cities require vast amounts of energy (e.g. to provide access to transport, cooling systems), which are massive producers …


Scaling Smartness, (De)Provincialising The City? The Asean Smart Cities Network And The Translational Politics Of Technocratic Regionalism, Lily Kong, Orlando Woods Oct 2021

Scaling Smartness, (De)Provincialising The City? The Asean Smart Cities Network And The Translational Politics Of Technocratic Regionalism, Lily Kong, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper explores the case study of the ASEAN Smart Cities Network (ASCN) to uncover the motivations and potential challenges associated with technocratic regionalism, by which we mean technology-driven forms of regional integration and consolidation. In the case of the ASCN, technocratic regionalism is used to spur urban development through the rollout of smart city plans, policies and projects across Southeast Asia. As such, it is a regional strategy designed to scale smartness, and thus deprovincialise the city by embedding it within transnational flows of capital, ideas and expertise. At the same time, however, already existing urban issues have the …


Cultural Districts Advocacy Guide, Su Fern Hoe Oct 2021

Cultural Districts Advocacy Guide, Su Fern Hoe

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Cultural districts strengthen our cities and communities and support the development of thriving places and people. Support for cultural districts is a high-return investment as their value is immense, multi-layered and far-reaching. However, while those benefits are embraced by many, not all believe it. Increasingly, cultural leaders are being challenged to demonstrate how supporting the arts and culture advances other agendas; from attracting investment to fostering liveable communities and enabling public safety.This advocacy guide makes a case for support of cultural districts as a necessity for building thriving places and people. Importantly, it provides a core set of ideas and …


Urban Governance And Electricity Losses: An Exploration Of Spatial Unevenness In Karachi, Pakistan, Ijlal Naqvi, Ate Poorthuis, Anirudh Govind Sep 2021

Urban Governance And Electricity Losses: An Exploration Of Spatial Unevenness In Karachi, Pakistan, Ijlal Naqvi, Ate Poorthuis, Anirudh Govind

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The inadequate supply of electricity in Pakistan disrupts everyday life and hampers industry and business; in this it is an emblematic indicator of the poor quality of urban governance pervasive in much of the Global South. We focus on the governance of Karachi’s electricity distribution system, and its spatial unevenness across this sprawling metropolis of 15 million residents which encompasses huge informal settlements alongside upscale housing and commercial plazas. Using a dataset with granular, neighborhood-level electricity data, we apply spatial and statistical modeling techniques to understand how transmission and distribution losses, i.e., the utility’s ability to bill for the electricity …


Diasporic Placemaking: The Internationalisation Of A Migrant Hometown In Post-Socialist China, Jiaqi M. Liu Nov 2020

Diasporic Placemaking: The Internationalisation Of A Migrant Hometown In Post-Socialist China, Jiaqi M. Liu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

International migration profoundly reshapes the urban landscape in sending and receiving countries. Compared to ethnic enclaves in migrant-receiving metropolises and remittance houses in sending communities, we know little about systematic urban changes led by emigration states. In this article, based on three months of fieldwork in a migrant hometown in China, I argue that the dispersion of emigrants per se does not make its urban space inherently ‘diasporic’. Rather, a ‘diasporic place’ can be strategically constructed by local sociopolitical actors, a process I conceptualise as ‘diasporic placemaking’. To create an international city branding and boost the consumption-based urban economy, the …


Responding To Extremes: Managing Urban Water Scarcity In The Late Nineteenth-Century Straits Settlements, Fiona Williamson Oct 2020

Responding To Extremes: Managing Urban Water Scarcity In The Late Nineteenth-Century Straits Settlements, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In 1877, the major towns of the Straits Settlements - Singapore, George Town, Penang Island and Malacca - suffered a drought of exceptional magnitude. The drought’s natural instigator was the El Niño phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climatic phenomenon then not understood by contemporary observers. The 1877 event has been explored in some depth for countries including India, China and Australia. Its impact on Southeast Asia however is less well-known and the story of how the event unfolded in Singapore and Malaysia has not been told. This paper explores how the contemporary British government responded to …


Towards More Inclusive Smart Cities: Reconciling The Divergent Logics Of Data And Discourse At The Margins, Jane Yeonjae Lee, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong Sep 2020

Towards More Inclusive Smart Cities: Reconciling The Divergent Logics Of Data And Discourse At The Margins, Jane Yeonjae Lee, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this article, we survey a growing body of literature within geography and other intersecting fields that trains attention on what inclusive smart cities are, or what they could be. In doing so, we build on debates around smart citizens, smart public participation, and grassroots and bottom-up smart cities that are concerned with making smart cities more inclusive. The growing critical scholarship on such dis- courses, however, alerts us to the knowledge politics that are involved in, and the urban inequalities that are deeply rooted within, the urban. Technological interventions con- tribute to these politics and inequalities in various ways. …


‘Living In A State Of Filth And Indifference To … Their Health’: Weather, Public Health And Urban Governance In Colonial George Town, Penang, Fiona Williamson, Katrina Proust May 2020

‘Living In A State Of Filth And Indifference To … Their Health’: Weather, Public Health And Urban Governance In Colonial George Town, Penang, Fiona Williamson, Katrina Proust

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article explores the development of public health infrastructure in George Town, Penang, before the 1930s. It argues that the extreme weather of the tropical climate led to a unique set of health challenges for George Town’s administrators, as the town grew from a small British base to a multi-cultural and thriving port. Weather and public health were (and still are) integrally connected,although the framing of this relationship has undergone significant shifts in thinking and appearance over time. One lens into this association is the situation and expression of these elements within municipal structures.During the nineteenth century, government departments were …


A Global Regression Method For Thermal Sharpening Of Urban Land Surface Temperatures From Modis And Landsat, James. W. Wang, Winston T. L. Chow, Yi-Chen Wang Apr 2020

A Global Regression Method For Thermal Sharpening Of Urban Land Surface Temperatures From Modis And Landsat, James. W. Wang, Winston T. L. Chow, Yi-Chen Wang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Land surface temperatures (LST) in urban landscapes are typically more heterogeneous than can be monitored by the spatial resolution of satellite-based thermal infrared sensors. Thermal sharpening (TS) methods permit the disaggregation of LST based on finer-grained multispectral information, but there is continued debate over which spectral indices are most appropriate for urban TS, and how they should be configured in a predictive regression framework. In this study, we evaluate the stability of various TS kernels with respect to LST at different spatial (Landsat 8) and diurnal (MODIS) scales, and present a new TS method, global regression for urban thermal sharpening …


Subverting The Logics Of "Smartness" In Singapore: Smart Eldercare And Parallel Regimes Of Sustainability, Orlando Woods Feb 2020

Subverting The Logics Of "Smartness" In Singapore: Smart Eldercare And Parallel Regimes Of Sustainability, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper argues that the divergent logics of “smartness” and “sustainability” can lead to parallel regimes of sustainability. Whilst sustainability is often used to justify the need for smart cities, smart cities are often undermined by the neoliberal logics of digital governance. Moreover, because the intersection of digital technologies and society is a negotiated one, smart solutions often fail to provide adequate solutions to social problems. This is especially true when smart solutions are used to augment or replace hitherto human-centred processes, like caregiving.Parallel regimes of sustainability are a response to these failures. Drawing onan analysis of a trial of …


Unlocking Pre-1850 Instrumental Meteorological Records: A Global Inventory, Stefan Bronnimann, Rob Allan, Linden Ashcroft, Saba Baer, Mariano Barriendos, Fiona Williamson, Et Al Dec 2019

Unlocking Pre-1850 Instrumental Meteorological Records: A Global Inventory, Stefan Bronnimann, Rob Allan, Linden Ashcroft, Saba Baer, Mariano Barriendos, Fiona Williamson, Et Al

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

A global inventory of early instrumental meteorological measurements is compiled. It comprises thousands of series, many of which have not been digitized, pointing to the potential of weather data rescue.Instrumental meteorological measurements from periods prior to the start of national weather services are designated “early instrumental data”. They have played an important role in climate research as they allow daily-to-decadal variability and changes of temperature, pressure, and precipitation, including extremes, to be addressed. Early instrumental data can also help place 21st century climatic changes into a historical context such as to define pre-industrial climate and its variability. Until recently, the …


Commoning Mobility: Towards A New Politics Of Mobility Transitions, Anna Nikolaeva, Peter Adey, Tim Cresswell, Jane Yeonjae Lee, Andre Nóvoa, Cristina Temenos Jun 2019

Commoning Mobility: Towards A New Politics Of Mobility Transitions, Anna Nikolaeva, Peter Adey, Tim Cresswell, Jane Yeonjae Lee, Andre Nóvoa, Cristina Temenos

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Scholars have argued that transitions to more sustainable and just mobilities require moving beyond technocentrism to rethink the very meaning of mobility in cities, communities, and societies. This paper demonstrates that such rethinking is inherently political. In particular, we focus on recent theorisations of commoning practices that have gained traction in geographic literatures. Drawing on our global comparative research of low‐carbon mobility transitions, we argue that critical mobilities scholars can rethink and expand the understanding of mobility through engagement with commons–enclosure thinking. We present a new concept, “commoning mobility,” a theorisation that both envisions and shapes practices that develop fairer …


Imagining An Old City In Nineteenth-Century France: Urban Renovation, Civil Society, And The Making Of Vieux Lyon, Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira Mar 2019

Imagining An Old City In Nineteenth-Century France: Urban Renovation, Civil Society, And The Making Of Vieux Lyon, Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Urban histories of nineteenth-century France have tended to focus on Paris and emphasize state actions. This has obscured movements that were crucial in shaping modern cities, particularly segments of civil society that worked on preserving old neighborhoods. This article focuses on Lyon—a “second city”—and analyzes how state-driven urban renovations under the Second Empire fostered a fin-de-siècle localist reaction that sought to preserve what was seen as Lyonnais urban forms (in particular neighborhoods defined by their narrow and crooked streets). Through an antiquarian discourse, cultural elites argued that these urban forms were an essential part of Lyonnais identity—which they feared was …


Religious Urbanism In Singapore: Competition, Commercialism And Compromise In The Search For Space, Orlando Woods Mar 2019

Religious Urbanism In Singapore: Competition, Commercialism And Compromise In The Search For Space, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper explores the recursive relationship between religious praxisand urban environments. It advances the concept of “religious urbanism” to showhow urban environments play an active role in shaping the praxis of religion,and how religious groups adopt secular logics in response to the pressures ofurban environments. Such logics have given rise to new, more pragmatic forms ofspatial reproduction that lead to the desecularisation of space. Desecularisationinvolves religious groups diminishing the secular properties of space, ratherthan attempting to achieve any lasting notion of sacredness. Drawing on therestrictive religio-spatial context of Singapore, I demonstrate howfast-growing religious groups are forced to compete, commercialise, andcompromise …


Trans-Boundary Variations Of Urban Drought Vulnerability And Its Impact On Water Resource Management In Singapore And Johor, Malaysia, Joon Chuah, Beatrice H. Ho, Winston T. L. Chow Jun 2018

Trans-Boundary Variations Of Urban Drought Vulnerability And Its Impact On Water Resource Management In Singapore And Johor, Malaysia, Joon Chuah, Beatrice H. Ho, Winston T. L. Chow

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Low-latitude areas generally experience relatively large precipitation totals, but droughts/dry spells do occur periodically and are potentially hazardous in these regions - especially within rapidly developing urban settlements. These areas typically have high water demand and therefore may potentially be subjected to water scarcity. Effective local water resource management lowering risks and vulnerabilities to drought is thus paramount, and these policies may be affected in regions with national borders sharing a common transboundary water resource. In this study, we (a) quantify and identify drought episodes using the Palmer Drought Severity Index in the neighbouring equatorial regions of Singapore and Johor, …


Contesting Access To Power In Urban Pakistan, Ijlal Naqvi May 2018

Contesting Access To Power In Urban Pakistan, Ijlal Naqvi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Studies of informal housing and urban citizenship in South Asia frequently link the precariousness of squatter life with the struggle to formalize engagement with the state. However, this article argues that the transition to a more formal mode of making claims on the state is a shift in terrain that is no less negotiated and contested. Through an ethnography of access to electrical power in Islamabad, Pakistan, this article explores the pervasiveness of informality in access to service delivery for a squatter settlement and its bourgeois neighbors. The politics of access to urban infrastructure reveal a state of pervasive predation …


The Heritage-Making Conundrum In Asian Cities: Real, Transformed And Imagined Legacies, David Ocon Apr 2018

The Heritage-Making Conundrum In Asian Cities: Real, Transformed And Imagined Legacies, David Ocon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The process of heritage-making is farfrom straightforward. Defining the meaning of heritage in young nations and citieswhere land availability is limited is a challenging exercise. It often crossesthe paths of history, religion, memory-shaping, development, andidentity-building. It requires fluent communication channels between civilsociety, local organisations and governments. Willingness to cooperate from allthe parties involved is essential; dialogue a must.In land-scarce or densely populated Asiancities, expansion and growth is colliding with the preservation of legacies, thepast and memory. This paper examines regional case studies from Hong Kong,Manila and Singapore, where preservation of cultural patrimony, development anddaily life follow conflicting paths. It sheds …


The Ideological Alignment Of Smart Urbanism In Singapore: Critical Reflections On A Political Paradox, Lily Kong, Orlando Woods Jan 2018

The Ideological Alignment Of Smart Urbanism In Singapore: Critical Reflections On A Political Paradox, Lily Kong, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Over the past decade, much has been written about the potential of smart urbanism to bring about various and lasting forms of betterment. The embedding of digital technologies within urban infrastructures has been well documented, and the efficiencies of smart models of urban governance and management have been lauded. More recently, however, the discourse has been labelled ‘hegemonic’, and accused of developing a view of smart technology that is blinkered by its failure to critique its socio-political effects. By focusing on the case of Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ initiative, this paper embraces the paradoxes at the heart of smart urbanism and, …


Mobile Cities, Modelling Policies: Importing/Exporting The Singapore ‘Model’ Of Development, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong Mar 2017

Mobile Cities, Modelling Policies: Importing/Exporting The Singapore ‘Model’ Of Development, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

A recent focus of research has been the making, mobility and mutations of urban policy. The global circulation of urban models – or exemplars of best practices and values that are deemed to be desirable and achievable – has gained significant traction. Such models are those that are dislocated from their place of origin, and transplanted to an adopted site. This chapter draws on the case of Singapore: one of the most emblematic examples of an importable/exportable urban model – a prototype for growth-oriented urban development with its normative and technical plans for growth and management – to foreground problems …


Pathways To Meet Critical Success Factors For Local Ppps: The Cases Of Urban Transport Infrastructure In Korean Cities, Yooil Bae, Yu-Min Joo Apr 2016

Pathways To Meet Critical Success Factors For Local Ppps: The Cases Of Urban Transport Infrastructure In Korean Cities, Yooil Bae, Yu-Min Joo

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have been utilized extensively in both developed and developing countries to provide various public services and infrastructure. The literature points to many common critical success factors, including a mature financial market, transparent regulatory framework, advanced technology, and people's acceptance of new forms, but those can vary from country to country. South Korea's mature market capitalist system and strong regulatory framework have led to somewhat successful infrastructure provision through PPPs at the national level, but as our two cases of urban transportation in the Seoul Metropolitan Area indicate, local-level PPPs have demonstrated mixed results. By elaborating on the …


Getting To The Heart Of Great Public Spaces, Su Fern Hoe, Jacqueline Liu, Tan Tarn How Jan 2016

Getting To The Heart Of Great Public Spaces, Su Fern Hoe, Jacqueline Liu, Tan Tarn How

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has flaggedthe start of car-free Sundays in the Civic District and Central BusinessDistrict this year.This move to make the area people-friendly is part of a $740 millionplan, announced in the 2015 Budget, to revitalise the Civic District andtransform it into "an integrated arts, culture and lifestyleprecinct". Highlights of the plan include the Jubilee Walk - an 8km trailthat wraps around landmarks from the National Museum to the Esplanade - and thenewly opened National Gallery Singapore


Assessment Of Measured And Perceived Microclimates Within A Tropical Urban Forest, Winston T. L. Chow, Siti Nur ‘Assyakirin Binte Ali Akbar, Su Li Heng, Matthias Roth Jan 2016

Assessment Of Measured And Perceived Microclimates Within A Tropical Urban Forest, Winston T. L. Chow, Siti Nur ‘Assyakirin Binte Ali Akbar, Su Li Heng, Matthias Roth

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Urban greenery is a favoured approach applied towards reducing urban warmth and climate discomfort, but ascertaining its measured and perceived effectiveness in tropical climates is relatively understudied. To this end, we investigated microclimate differences within an urban park (the Singapore Botanic Gardens) to assess if variations in plot-scale land cover affect both objective (measured) and subjective (surveyed) microclimate data. Over two monsoonal seasons, we obtained data from four distinct sites—a tropical rainforest stand, a palm tree valley, a water-body feature, and the park visitors’ centre. Measured climate data (e.g. air temperature, vapour pressure, wind velocity and globe temperatures) were used …


Building Participatory Organizations For Common Pool Resource Management: Water User Group Promotion In Indonesia, Jacob I. Ricks Jan 2016

Building Participatory Organizations For Common Pool Resource Management: Water User Group Promotion In Indonesia, Jacob I. Ricks

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

States are increasingly striving to create participatory local organizations for joint management of common pool resources. What local conditions determine success of such state efforts? What effect do these efforts have? Drawing on controlled comparisons between three districts in Indonesia and an original survey of 92 water user groups, I demonstrate that local political contexts condition the effectiveness of participatory irrigation policies. When irrigation is politically salient, local politicians pressure bureaucrats to better engage with farmers. The data also show that training programs are not as effective at increasing water user organization activity as frequent contact between bureaucrats and farmers.


People-Centric Approach Needed For Effective Urban Planning, Says Expert, David Chan Jul 2015

People-Centric Approach Needed For Effective Urban Planning, Says Expert, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

SMU Behavioural Sciences Institute Director Professor David Chan delivered the keynote address at the third Urban Sustainability R&D Congress. Held at Suntec, the two-day event was attended by representatives from public agencies, research institutes and private sector organisations. During the keynote address, Prof Chan cited the upcoming Singapore-Kuala Lumpur (KL) High Speed Rail terminal and its implications from a larger transient commuter population in the Jurong area. He said that urban planners must take a people-centric approach and understand how the same built environment can impact different groups of people differently, or impact different people differently over time. Prof Chan …


Prioritizing Urban Sustainability Solutions: Coordinated Approaches Must Incorporate Scale-Dependent Built Environment Induced Effects, Matei Georgescu, Winston T. L. Chow, Z. H. Wang, Anthony J. Brazel, Barbara Trapido-Lurie, M. Roth, Valeria Benson Jun 2015

Prioritizing Urban Sustainability Solutions: Coordinated Approaches Must Incorporate Scale-Dependent Built Environment Induced Effects, Matei Georgescu, Winston T. L. Chow, Z. H. Wang, Anthony J. Brazel, Barbara Trapido-Lurie, M. Roth, Valeria Benson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Because of a projected surge of several billion urban inhabitants by mid-century, a rising urgency exists to advance local and strategically deployed measures intended to ameliorate negative consequences on urban climate (e.g., heat stress, poor air quality, energy/water availability). Here we highlight the importance of incorporating scale-dependent built environment induced solutions within the broader umbrella of urban sustainability outcomes, thereby accounting for fundamental physical principles. Contemporary and future design of settlements demands cooperative participation between planners, architects, and relevant stakeholders, with the urban and global climate community, which recognizes the complexity of the physical systems involved and is ideally fit …


Multiscale Modeling And Evaluation Of Urban Surface Energy Balance In The Phoenix Metropolitan Area, Stephen R. Shaffer, Winston T. L. Chow, Matei Georgescu, Peter Hyde, Darrel Jenerette, Alex Mahalov, M. Moustaoui, Benjamin Lyle Ruddell Feb 2015

Multiscale Modeling And Evaluation Of Urban Surface Energy Balance In The Phoenix Metropolitan Area, Stephen R. Shaffer, Winston T. L. Chow, Matei Georgescu, Peter Hyde, Darrel Jenerette, Alex Mahalov, M. Moustaoui, Benjamin Lyle Ruddell

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Physical mechanisms of incongruency between observations and Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model predictions are examined. Limitations of evaluation are constrained by (i) parameterizations of model physics, (ii) parameterizations of input data, (iii) model resolution, and (iv) flux observation resolution. Observations from a new 22.1-m flux tower situated within a residential neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona, are utilized to evaluate the ability of the urbanized WRF to resolve finescale surface energy balance (SEB) when using the urban classes derived from the 30-m-resolution National Land Cover Database. Modeled SEB response to a large seasonal variation of net radiation forcing was tested during …


Seasonal Dynamics Of A Suburban Energy Balance In Phoenix, Arizona, Winston T. L. Chow, Thomas J. Volo, Enrique R. Vivoni, G. Darrel Jenerette, Benjamin L. Ruddell Mar 2014

Seasonal Dynamics Of A Suburban Energy Balance In Phoenix, Arizona, Winston T. L. Chow, Thomas J. Volo, Enrique R. Vivoni, G. Darrel Jenerette, Benjamin L. Ruddell

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Observations of local-scale urban surface energy balance (SEB), which include fluxes of net all-wave radiation (Q*), and eddy covariance measurements of sensible (QH) and latent heat (QE) were collected in an arid Phoenix, AZ suburb from January to December 2012. We studied diurnal variations in SEB partitioning over four distinct seasons: winter, equinoxes, and summer; the latter period is further subdivided into (1) months prior to and (2) months occurring during the North American Monsoon. Largest flux densities were observed in summer, with most available energy partitioned into QH. Much less energy is partitioned into QE, but this term is …