This is a past event.

Impacts of Irrigation, Agriculture, and Urbanization on Regional Climate and Air Quality

Agricultural irrigation and urbanization are two different types of land uses.  As global warming continues, while irrigation is expected to play an increasingly important role in crop production in the U.S. and many parts of the world, urbanization is likely to slow down and/or grow with more green space and less emissions to mitigate the effects of urban heat and air pollution.  In this talk, I will present the progress that my team (in collaboration with others) has made in quantifying and understanding the impacts of irrigation and urbanization on regional climate and air quality in China and U.S. I will show the challenges of resolving and predicting neighborhood vulnerability to urban heat and air pollution, as well as the critical importance of the crop land emissions in regional air quality management. I will conclude that smart irrigation has compelling benefits for agriculture and urbanization, and recommend the smart-and-connected community science engagement (enabled in part by the new technology and low-cost sensors) as a key pathway to achieve smart irrigation.

Bio: Dr. Jun Wang is James E. Ashton Professor in the College of Engineering, Interim Chair for the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, and Assistant Director of the Iowa Technology Institute at the University of Iowa. His research focuses on the integration of satellite remote sensing and chemistry transport models to study air quality, wildfires, aerosol-cloud interaction, and land-air interaction. He has authored ~175 research articles (H-index 53), co-edited two books, served as a science team member for 10 satellite missions (including inaugural team for TEMPO and MAIA) and the NASA’s senior review panel member for Earth science (twice). He received his Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences at the University of Alabama–Huntsville in 2005 under the support of NASA’s Earth system science graduate fellowship and conducted his postdoctoral work in Harvard University with the support of NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoctoral fellowship in 2005-2007. He was a recipient of NASA’s New Investigator Program award in 2009 and the AGU Ascent award in 2022. More about his research team can be found at: http://arroma.uiowa.edu