New research from the University of Illinois Springfield is leading to simpler and less costly methods for cities to predict the weather.
“In the research world, we use a lot of remote sensing or satellite data that is not able to give us enough detail in cities, where the land cover changes really quickly,” said Kyle Blount, an assistant professor of ecohydrology. “If we want to know what the temperature is at any point, we have to have a lot of sensors in a lot of places.”
Blount, a guest on the WTAX Morning Newswatch, said the emphasis here is on how shady a particular place can be.
He also suggests planting trees along sidewalks to mitigate their warming effects.
“We have a lot of competing priorities,” Blount said. “When we’re talking about how we manage our cities, and especially if we are talking about privately-owned land, we can’t tell people what they get to do with their lands necessarily, but we can help inform them about what decisions might help make things cooler.”
Another of his studies examines the need for urban water research to evolve.
