Showing 63 results for Author: Melissa R. Dumas
Apr, 2026
Book Chapter
With climate change, we can expect to see more extreme heat and cold events in Texas. Both of these types of events can be a direct threat to public health. They can also affect public health indirectly, as hot stagnant air can limit harmful urban emissions from exiting an urban area. Rising electricity demand during both types of extreme events can increase electricity us…
Mar, 2026
Conference Paper
Infrastructure networks play a crucial role in our day-to-day lives, and modeling these infrastructure networks can help decisionmakers prepare for and respond to disruptions such as natural disasters or cyberattacks. Because these infrastructure networks depend on each other, it is not sufficient to model a single network in isolation. We build on previous single-network-…
Mar, 2026
Conference Paper
US power outage data has been collected by organizations such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) through Environment for Analysis Geo-Located Energy Infrastructure (EAGLE-I: freely available) and poweroutage.us (commercial data: available to purchase). However, these sources do not provide information specific to outages of critical customers. Critical customers inclu…
Mar, 2026
Conference Paper
While climate models have evolved over time to produce high fidelity and high resolution climate forecasts, visualization and analysis of the output of the model simulations has been limited, typically constrained to single dimensional charts for visualization and basic aggregate statistics for analytics. Same is true for the large troves of observational data available fr…
Sep, 2025
Journal
Urban form (e.g., building morphology such as height or footprint) can be used to predict environmental footprints, such as energy/water consumption and carbon emissions. Although progress has been made in predicting building characteristics to fill gaps in observation or derive 3-D representations, the relationships between morphology and other variables such as land use…
Dec, 2024
Journal
We examine the differences in meteorological output from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model run at 270 m horizontal resolution using 10 m, 100 m and 1 km resolution 3D neighborhood morphological inputs and with no morphological inputs. We find that the spatial variability in temperature, humidity, and other meteorological variables across the city can vary wi…
Nov, 2024
Journal
To be implemented on climate-relevant scales, direct air capture of CO2 (DAC) will require large capital-intensive facilities and careful attention to cost minimization. In making decisions among potential sites for DAC facilities, all of the factors that will impact process cost and efficiency should be considered. In this paper we focus on a factor that has previously re…
Nov, 2024
Journal
Cities are concentrators of complex, multi-sectoral interactions. As keystones in the interconnected human-Earth system, cities have an outsized impact on the Earth system. We describe a multi-lens framework for organizing our understanding of the complexity of urban systems and scientific research on urban systems. We then describe four critical dimensions along which imp…
Jul, 2024
Conference Paper
Heatmap is a common geovisualization method that interpolates and visualizes a set of point observations on a map surface. Most of online web mapping libraries implement a one-pass heatmap algorithm using HTML5 canvas or WebGL for efficient heatmap generation. However, such implementation applies additive operations that accumulate the rendering of point weights on the map…
Jun, 2024
Journal
The Neighborhood Adaptive Tissues for Urban Resilience Futures tool (NATURF) is a Python workflow that generates files readable by the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. NATURF uses geopandas (Jordahl et al., 2020) and hamilton (Krawczyk & Izzy, 2022) to calculate 132 building parameters from shapefiles with building footprint and height information. These param…
May, 2024
Journal
The cost and efficiency of direct air capture (DAC) of carbon dioxide (CO2) will be decisive in determining whether this technology can play a large role in decarbonization. To probe the role of meteorological conditions on DAC we examine, at 1 × 1° resolution for the continental United States (U.S.), the impacts of temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, and CO2 conc…