David J. Sailor

NEWS ARCHIVES:

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The American Meteorological Society (AMS) held its 7th Symposium on the Urban Environment in San Diego, Sept. 10-13, 2007. The conference was co-located with the 7th Coastal Meteorology conference, resulting in some interesting joint sessions. The Urban Symposium was co-convened by Bob Bornstein, Jason Ching, and David Sailor. Presentations were recorded by AMS and should be available at their conference web site soon (www.ametsoc.org). Many good pictures taken at the conference are uploaded at www.fuse.pdx.edu/7thcoastalurban.htm. (posted Sept 16, 2007).

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PART TIME SUMMER WORK ASSISTING AN URBAN CLIMATE RESEARCH PROJECT

We seek students interested in environmental research to drive car-window-mounted temperature sensors on pre-determined routes through Portland neighborhoods during selected days/times over the period of June – August 2007. Each “traverse” will take approximately one hour and will occur at various times of day (~5am, ~3pm, ~10pm). Student assistants will be given 1-2 days of advance notice for scheduled traverses, and will be given an opportunity to sign up for shifts. Each assistant will focus their traverse on a pre-defined region within the Portland area (that we will try to coordinate with where they live).

To apply you must have a valid driver’s license, access to your own vehicle, and proof of insurance. You will also be required to attend a one-hour PSU driver safety course. You will be reimbursed for mileage and paid at an hourly rate of $15.

The data you gather will help us better understand the thermal environment of cities and how land use and land cover affect the urban climate (see www.fuse.pdx.edu - posted 05/15/07).

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The U.S. Department of Energy in their April 2007 release of EnergyPlus v2.0 has included the Green Roof module that we developed here at Portland State University. This module allows building energy modelers to explicitly account for the energy balance associated with a green roof construction. We are currently developing further refinements and extensions to this module which we will likely incorporate in the next release. See my Eco-structure magazine interview for further details on Portland State's green roof research (posted 4/25/07).

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The American Meteorological Society's Seventh Symposium on the Urban Environment will be held jointly with the Seventh Conference on Coastal Atmospheric and Oceanic Prediction Processes in San Diego, CA, 10-13 September 2007. This symposium is being co-organized by Bob Bornstein, Jason Ching, and David Sailor. Abstracts are due May 11, 2007 (posted 3/11/07).

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Professors Sailor, Spolek, and Erwin of PSU have received funding from the Ecoworks Foundation with matching funds from the City of Portland's Office of Sustainable Development to develop modeling and experiments related to the energy and stormwater runoff performance of ecoroofs. This funding will establish an ecoroof laboratory in the Mechanical and Materials Engineering Department that will supplement our current efforts at measuring thermal characteristics of ecoroof soils. In addition, Gerding Edlen - a local development company has provided some matching funds and a commitment to provide PSU researchers with access to their ecoroof projects for performance monitoring and gathering of data necessary for validating PSU's ecoroof models. In a show of institutional support for this work Portland State has supplemented this effort with significant cost-sharing. The project runs for a period of 3 years (posted 11/27/06).

In 2003 the U.S. EPA commissioned Dr. Sailor (through a subcontract from PQA) to develop and implement a web-based tool that urban planners and government officials could use to estimate the potential impacts of urban heat island mitigation on the thermal environment, air quality, and energy consumption of US cities. After 3 years of effort the Mitigation Impact Screening Tool (MIST) has now been released! The tool is available at www.heatislandmitigationtool.com (posted 8/5/06).

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The journal Environmental Modelling and Software has published our work on "Correcting aggregate energy consumption data to account for variability in local weather", 21, 733-738 (posted 5/26/06).

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We have received funding from the US EPA in support of our proposal with Quantec LLC to implement an ecoroof module within the building energy simulation code EnergyPlus. This is a Phase I SBIR award that will hopefully lead to continued support of our modeling and laboratory measurement efforts related to ecoroof characterization (posted 4/15/06).

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In collaboration with Mark Faust of PSU's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department we have secured a faculty fellowship grant from the Intel corporation. This grant will facilitate the development of interdisciplinary team projects that students will work on as part of their final projects in MME and ECE courses. The wireless sensor network technology obtained as part of this grant will also support the development of pilot-scale research projects with applications in the urban environment (posted 2/27/06)

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The Mechanical and Materials Engineering Department is in the midst of a move to our new space on 4th Avenue (near the FAB). The new building is quite nice!!! Our new physical location and regular mail address is:

Engineering Bldg. Rm. 401, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Portland, OR 97201 (posted 12/12/05)

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We will be presenting 2 talks at the upcoming annual meeting of the AMS in Atlanta. Both are in the 6th Symposium on the Urban Environment. The first (on Tuesday afternoon, January 30) is a general overview on Heat Island Mitigation efforts (past and future) that I will present in Sue Grimmond's session on UHI mitigation. The second is a talk in Jason Ching's session on urban modeling databases - the talk introduces a database of monthly anthropogenic heating profiles that we have generated for over 50 large US cities (posted 10/28/05).

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Dr. Sailor is interested in adding one or more undergraduate and graduate student researchers to the team already working on current project including the FUSE project. If you are interested please send an email (posted 10/05/05)

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Our manuscript "Field measurement of albedo for limited extent test surfaces" has been accepted by the journal Solar Energy and should appear in print - fall 2005 (posted 9/14/05)

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At the annual Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science awards ceremony (June 2005) Dr. Sailor's research accomplishments were recognized with a Faculty Outstanding Research Award for 2004-2005 (posted 06/29/05)

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Dr. Sailor has been appointed to a three year term on the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Board on the Urban Environment, effective May 2005. This board is charged with planning for and ensuring the quality of scientific conferences in the field of the urban environment, preparing statements on scientific and policy issues, and providing advice to the AMS Council.

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Our paper: "Modeling the Impacts of Anthropogenic Heating on the Urban Climate of Philadelphia: A comparison of implementations in two PBL schemes" published in Atmospheric Environment 39 (1), 73-84, is now available on-line at the publisher.

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Congratulations to Paul Breslow (my final PhD student from the Tulane days) for successfully defending his dissertation in which we introduce a new paradigm for short term load forecasting. We are working on the corresponding journal article which we hope to have in print later in 2005.

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We have received funding from the NSF for an exciting new interdisciplinary project to look at the complex feedback mechanisms affecting urban climate, air quality, and adaptive/reactive human response. The project starts 9/1/04 and runs for 54 months. Visit the FUSE (Feedbacks between Urban Systems and the Environment) website at www.fuse.pdx.edu.

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Ecoroofs in the news... Science News, that is. In the Sept 4, 2004 issue, Science News explores hydrological, ecosystem, and climate implications of impervious surfaces. Our work on ecoroofs in Portland is discussed on p. 2 of this article.

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At the 5th Symposium on the Urban Environment (Aug 23-26, 2004) I presented a poster on anthropogenic heating profiles in US cities and an oral paper on mesoscale modeling Sailor_9_13.pps of the effect of high spatial and temporal resolution anthropgenic heating's impact on Houston.

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