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CUNY

The City College of New York 
UFD

Our research focusses on the intersectionality of ubanization and climate change. We focus both on research and communication.
2026/ 2027 
        
                  

Urban
Fluid
Dynamics
Lab

NASA EnAACT


The Enhancing Air Quality Analysis for Cities using TEMPO is a NASA-funded project to advance the capability of TEMPO. The project intends to use the geostationary satellite’s output to understand and model air quality for dense urban spaces. The project will particularly focus on PM2.5 and Ozone. The project will use field observations, urban-scale models, and AI/ML methods to enhance the TEMPO outputs.

Currently, TEMPO is mainly intended to be used at regional scales. Our goal is to extend its applicability to city and neighborhood scales where air quality is a major issue impacting health and infrastructure.


The project combines mobile field measurements of primary pollutants, high-resolution urban air quality modeling, and AI/ML based models to underdstand and forecast air quality at relevant urban scales. 

Under The Scorching Sun (movie)


"The climate crisis is about the Global South’s present. Not the Global North’s future.” - Disha Ravi, a Climate activist from India. This statement was echoed in a recently conducted survey on climate change perception by Yale University where majority of Americans surveyed, were worried about climate change but could not explicitly point out how it impacted their daily life. In places like South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and tropical islands throughout the planet, the specter of climate change looms large in every day life with heat stress being the foremost risk.

Under The Scorching Sun,  documents  the plight of everyday workers in the Global South under the influence of extreme heat. The movie was filmed in Chennai, India in August 2023. Chennai, a major manufacturing and technology hub in India had a population of around 5.5 million in 1991. Today the city is home to nearly 11.2 million people, growing at a rate of 2% each year over the last 2 decades (the population density is around 28,000 people per square kilometer, about the same as New York City). Most of the Indian Metropolitan areas are poorly planned and are struggling to accommodate the ballooning migrant worker population. In a battle for space, these workers often work and live in environments that are subjected to unbearable conditions. The ambient heat index during the mid-summer months in Chennai average around 120 ˚F and on many occasions the wet bulb temperature reaches dangerously close to 95 ˚F - the maximum temperature that the body can regulate without shutting down.

Most of our characters are working class people, native to Chennai.
Borewell Sampath Sweeper Dhana Fabricator Wasim Cable Guy Vinod Ironer Kumar Food Deliverer Mani LPG Delivery Murugan Florist Rani
The movie was shot with a visual and an infrared camera. The infrared images captured the worker’s body temperature and the surrounding surface temperature highlighting the environmental heat stress. The movie was conceived and produced by Prathap Ramamurthy. It was jointly directed by Jagannath Radhakrishnan and Prathap Ramamurthy. Omar Addasi was the cinematographer. Sound Design was completed by Shaiju M and the movie was edited by Abhishikta Kaila. Jagannath Radhakrishnan and Ajay G handled the VFX work and Tharun Pa did the color correction. Aithihya was incharge of the graphics.

Watch the movie here- https://vimeo.com/989040824/c7803c58e8

Observations/


Our lab coducts fundamental research in to the transport of mass, momentum, and heat in the atmospheric boundary layer. We use micrometerological proinciples to observe the surface to atmosphere interactions over complex terrains. We particularly focus on urban and coastal urban boundary layers. The work helps us to understand and develop physics based models to represent these complex environments. We have permanent facilities in NYC and alos have capacity to   conduct these measurements anywhere required.

 Coastal-Rural-Urban Gradient: 
The spectral analysis exhibits the presence of vastly different flow regimes along the coastal-rural-urban transect. The coastal site is dominated by the sea breeze effect that dictates the transport of heat and momentum. The urban and rural sites are influenced by local land cover characteristics that impact the hygro-thermal climate.




Urban mixed-layer turbulence: A key part of our lab’ work is multi-scale urban observations- from indoor to city-scale. We use traditional boundary layer techniques to study surface layer and mixed layer characteristics as well as work on developing cost-effective sesnors for understanding indoor/outddor airquality.

We focus on understanding the complex boundary layer characteristics over the urban and coastal urban regions. We employ profilers- cielometer, microwave radiometer, and Doppler lidar - to study the transport of mass, momentum, and heat. We have an active campaign in NYC and in Summer 2022, deployed them in Houston, Texas. 

Our lab is also involved in developing sesnors to study indoor/outdoor air quality. We use open source platforms and cost-effective sensors to develop instrumentation platform that is capable of sensing and communicating the data.  










Coastal-Rural-Urban Gradient



Urban mixed-layer turbulence
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