In-person

Monitoring Global Urban Environments and their Properties from Space

Wed Apr 22, 2026 12:00 p.m.—1:00 p.m.

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Monitoring Global Urban Environments and their Properties from Space
Wednesday, April 22 | 12:00–1:00 pm
Earth Observation Lab, 21 Sachem Street, New Haven
Speaker: Dr. Tirthankar Chakraborty (TC)

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.

Lunch will be provided.

Abstract: Advancements in satellite remote sensing and computational improvements have made it easier to monitor urban environments and their complexities across spatiotemporal scales. During this seminar, I will provide a broad overview of our past and ongoing studies on monitoring urban environments and their associated environmental and climate signals, including urban heat, floods, vegetation, and clouds. Additionally, I will discuss the use of state-of-the-art high-resolution satellite observations to extract facet-level urban biophysical properties, which can be integrated into both process-based and data-driven models. Finally, I will discuss uncertainties in several of these estimates and what they mean for quantifying environmental and climate hazards, including broader downstream applications of these estimates.

Biography

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.