Please join the Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative for a seminar presented by Qi Li, Assisstant Profesor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University.

The title of her talk is "Understanding the Impacts of Urban Canopy on the Lower Atmosphere: A Microscale Perspective and Implications Beyond". 

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Abstract: Urban land surface modifies the flows in the lower atmosphere, called the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL); it also represents a critical source of various scalars (e.g., heat and passive pollutants) and particles (e.g., dust, microplastics, etc.). However, it remains a persistent challenge in large-scale weather and climate modeling systems to represent these transport processes. In the first part of the talk, we discuss how urban canopy modifies the transport of momentum, passive scalars, and heavy particles, focusing especially on the mean momentum transport. In the second part of the talk, going beyond the microscales, we examine the implications of anthropogenic sources of microplastic particles, especially fibers in global atmospheric long-range transport. A semi-analytical model based on the
slender body theory and parameterization of the rotational dynamics is developed. The model is applied to field measurement data of airborne microplastic fibers collected in the US national parks and implications of the results will be discussed.

Bio: Dr. Qi Li is an assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. She completed her Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University in 2016. Prior to joining Cornell University, she was a post-doctoral researcher in the Water Center at Columbia University working on numerical simulations of atmospheric turbulence. Her research focuses on developing and applying computational models to improve
the understanding of turbulent flows and transport of scalars in the lower atmosphere, especially over complex surfaces, such as the urban environment. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award.