The Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions presents
Tirthankar Chakraborty, Earth Scientist, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory:
“Monitoring Global Urban Environments and their Properties from Space.”
The Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions invites you to a lunchtime seminar exploring how satellite remote sensing is transforming our understanding of cities and climate. Dr. Tirthankar Chakraborty of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will share insights from his past and ongoing research on monitoring urban environments across space and time, with a focus on urban heat, flooding, vegetation, clouds, and other environmental signals that shape everyday life in cities around the world.
Drawing on state of the art high-resolution satellite observations and large-scale computational tools such as Google Earth Engine, Dr. Chakraborty will discuss how facet level urban biophysical properties can be extracted and integrated into both process based and data driven models. He will also address uncertainties in these estimates and what they mean for quantifying environmental and climate hazards, with implications for extreme events, coastal cities, and broader downstream applications.
This is an opportunity to engage with cutting edge research at the intersection of urbanization, climate science, and geospatial analytics. Students, faculty, and staff with interests in Earth observation, environmental change, urban systems, and spatial data science are warmly encouraged to attend.
Dr. Tirthankar Chakraborty (TC) is an Earth Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) with interest in atmosphere-biosphere interactions at various scales. Before joining PNNL in 2021, TC received his PhD from Yale University, where he developed a surface-energy budget perspective on aerosol-climate interactions. He has also worked extensively on impacts of urbanization on weather and climate by leveraging satellite measurements, crowdsourced weather station data, and modeling frameworks. His past contributions in this space include developing the most comprehensive global urban heat island dataset, conducting some of the first large-scale studies on urban heat disparities, examining the impact of urban humidity feedback on heat stress across scales, and isolating urban warming signals from regional to continental scales. His current work at PNNL is focused on improving urban representation in land models and examining extreme events over coastal cities. He often uses the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud computing platform for geospatial analyses and was one of 26 inaugural GEE Developer Experts in the world. He received the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2023 to improve urban representation in Earth system models through planetary-scale data-model integration. TC is also the PNNL institutional PI on multiple other projects funded by DOE, NASA, and NIH on topics ranging from psychologically relevant heat stress estimates to impacts of energy transition scenarios on building energy demand.