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Urban Atmospheric Science

Programme background

This new research programme activity on Urban Atmospheric Science will deliver aspects of the NERC strategy: Next Generation Science for Planet Earth. It has been developed as part of the Environment, Pollution & Human Health theme.

Research in the Environment, Pollution & Human Health theme is directed at elucidating key environmental processes that form part of a causal pathway between an environmental hazard and disease outcome, and providing a predictive capability of the risk to human health and well-being posed by environmental factors.

This research programme directly addresses three of the major challenges in the Environment, Pollution & Human Health theme, specifically at the scales relevant to the urban environment:

• To improve measurement and monitoring of the distribution of pollutants and pathogens at required time and space scales;
• To improve knowledge of processes and models of the dynamics of transport and transformation of pollutants and pathogens in the environment;
• To improve assessments of pollutant and pathogen exposure and risk to humans.

Air pollution is a major environmental risk to health, and urban areas are a focus for both people and for the pollution generated by human activity. Cities also act as urban heat islands, which have the potential to directly affect the health and welfare of residents through elevated temperatures and heat waves, but also affect the distribution and concentration of pollutants through secondary effects on local meteorology.

Assessing the risk of air pollution to people in urban areas, developing policies to protect them, and monitoring the effects of these policies is difficult because it is hard to understand and predict how pollutants behave in the urban environment. Some reasons for this include lack of understanding of basic processes governing pollutant concentration and distribution in the urban atmosphere, how the urban atmosphere interacts with the overlying boundary layer, how this might be altered by changes in climate and the built environment itself, and how all this will impact on human health.

To respond to these issues, the Urban Atmospheric Science programme will invest in innovative environmental science with strong links to health research and the required infrastructure investments in an urban environment.

The overall aim of the programme is to generate new knowledge and predictive capacity of key environmental processes governing the distribution, transport, and transformation of atmospheric pollutants in urban areas, that is informed by, and informs, research on pollutant exposure and risk to human health.

NERC is planning to invest in a collaborative research programme of up to three-year duration to deliver research, infrastructure, and knowledge exchange with users, using London and the southeast as the study site.

As part of the Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) accredited Environment & Human Health programme, the Urban Atmospheric Science programme was designed with the input of several LWEC partners, including EPSRC, MRC, and the Environment Agency (along with valuable advice from others, including the Health Protection Agency). It contributes to the delivery of Objective D, 'to protect human, plant and animal health from diseases, pests, and environmental hazards', by improving the predictive capability for urban air pollution and climate, and hence facilitating the development of cost effective abatement and mitigation strategies, with the ultimate benefit of reducing the burden of human disease linked with environmental causes. The outputs from the programme may also relate to objectives E (urban and transport systems) and B (ecosystem services in the sense of clean air).