Urban soil pollution has become a major concern in megacities around the world. Due to their non-degradable characteristic, toxic metals are among the most notorious pollutants. In this study determination of total and bioavailable fraction of toxic metals Ni, Cu, Cr, Zn, Co, Cd, Pb and Mn, in surface soils of district 16th in Tehran municipality is considered. Furthermore, metals uptake potent...

Urban soils provide an array of ecosystem services to inhabitants of cities and towns. Urbanization affects soils and their capacity to provide ecosystem services directly through disturbance and management (e.g., irrigation) and indirectly through changes in the environment (e.g., heat island effect and pollution). Both direct and indirect effects contribute to form a mosaic of soil conditions...

In remote sensing studies of land surface temperatures (LST), thematic land-use and land-cover (LULC) data are frequently employed for simple correlation analyses between LULC types and their thermal signatures. Development of quantitative surface descriptors could improve our capabilities for modeling urban thermal landscapes and advance urban climate research. This study developed an analytic...

Urban land surface models (LSM) are commonly evaluated for short periods (a few weeks to months) because of limited observational data. This makes it difficult to distinguish the impact of initial conditions on model performance or to consider the response of a model to a range of possible atmospheric conditions. Drawing on results from the first urban LSM comparison, these two issues are consi...

Urban agriculture is growing in cities across the United States. It has the potential to provide multiple benefits, including increased food security. Concerns about soil contamination in urban areas can be an impediment to urban agriculture. Lead is the most common contaminant in urban areas. In this paper, direct (soil ingestion via outdoor and indoor exposure) and indirect (consumption of fo...

[1] Since the middle of the last century, global surface air temperature exhibits an increasing trend, with nocturnal temperatures increasing at a much higher rate. Proposed causative mechanisms include the radiative impact of atmospheric aerosols on the nocturnal boundary layer (NBL) where the temperature response is amplified due to shallow depth and its sensitivity to potential destabilizati...

We adapt a physically-based single-layer urban canopy model (UCM) to study the energy budget in urban areas. The energy budget scheme in this study is similar to the scheme implemented in the WRF-NOAH urban canopy model, but it is decoupled from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Simulations are carried out to quantify the sensitivity of the model to each atmospheric and surface ...

Our work is regarding the analysis of land use changes, in the light of “saving soil” against the expansion due to unearned plus value of land: The loss of natural and agricultural surface in front of the expanding urban environment is a critical aspect of unsustainability of urban development, especially in the way it was carried out in the past decades. The measure of the physical transition ...

To date, little attention has been given to remote sensing-based algorithms for inferring urban surface evapotranspiration. A multi-source parallel model based on ASTER data was one of the first examples, but its accuracy can be improved. We therefore present a modified multi-source parallel model in this study, which has made improvements in parameterization and model accuracy. The new feature...