Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2007AZ219B

Geospatial Analysis of Urban Thermal Gradients: Application to Tucson Arizonas Projected Water Demand

Institute: Arizona
Year Established: 2007 Start Date: 2007-03-01 End Date: 2008-06-30
Total Federal Funds: $24,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $50,280

Principal Investigators: Christopher Scott, Andrew Comrie, Stephen Yool

Project Summary: The water budgets of urban and urbanizing areas are hypothetically affected in a significant manner by rising regional temperatures, which have been demonstrated to result from urban heat island effects and broader warming across the Southwest. Both urban and regional warming are projected to increase even further with city growth and climate change. It is therefore important to understand the relation between urban water demand and spatial and temporal temperature trends in urban [-izing] areas. This project proposes to conduct geospatial analysis of Landsat TM thermal infrared data (x, y, t) and DEM (z), thereby generating surfaces of heat source-sink gradients, signatures of the persistence of thermal threshold exceedances, and identifying features or episodes of thermal reset, e.g., [micro-] topographic cooling corridors, vegetation buffers, or precipitation events. For the Tucson Arizona basin, thermal gradients will be mapped over the period 1984 to the present and spatially correlated to urban growth, urban heat island effects, and water supply. Indoor vs. outdoor water use will be estimated from supply data using temporal disaggregation techniques. Results will be assessed with reference to the growth and water demand scenarios in the Tucson Water Plan 2000-2050. The resulting thermal surfaces and persistence datasets are also expected to be of utility to planners, urban landscape ecologists, and the research community. The project will a) produce a manuscript for submission to a peer-reviewed journal, b) result in multiple proposals for continued investigation targeted particularly at EPAs Science to Achieve Results (STAR) and NSF's Coupled Natural-Human Systems (CNH) programs, and c) support the teams efforts to strengthen the University of Arizonas capability and expertise in the area of human-environmental feedbacks in the rapidly urbanizing Sonoran Desert Ecoregion.