That’s where climate scientist Katia Lamer, director of operations at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Center for Multiscale Applied Sensing, and her laser-firing truck come in. The truck uses a lidar sensor, which fires invisible lasers to track objects around it, in order to map out the movement of particles through a city. This allows Lamer to monitor the airflow in a particular area, like a narrow alley between buildings, to get a sense of the climate.
How is a laser-firing truck helping understand urban heat islands?
Answer: By using its lasers to gather loads of data.
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Cities are hot, and with our rapidly warming planet, they’re only getting hotter. The first step to potentially cooling these urban heat islands is understanding how heat affects them in the first place. That means data, which means taking measurements. A lot of measurements.
That’s where climate scientist Katia Lamer, director of operations at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Center for Multiscale Applied Sensing, and her laser-firing truck come in. The truck uses a lidar sensor, which fires invisible lasers to track objects around it, in order to map out the movement of particles through a city. This allows Lamer to monitor the airflow in a particular area, like a narrow alley between buildings, to get a sense of the climate.
“What if you stack two buildings in a row, like if they’re different heights from one another, how does that all influence the local weather? … In each neighborhood, each side of each building sees its own microclimate.” In addition to lidar, Lamer also gathers data through sensors attached to balloons that she releases into the air, so she can get measurements from up to 3 miles above a city.
That’s where climate scientist Katia Lamer, director of operations at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Center for Multiscale Applied Sensing, and her laser-firing truck come in. The truck uses a lidar sensor, which fires invisible lasers to track objects around it, in order to map out the movement of particles through a city. This allows Lamer to monitor the airflow in a particular area, like a narrow alley between buildings, to get a sense of the climate.
