This project will help the research team understand the impacts of urbanization on weather and climate. It will provide valuable insights into how cities can influence our local environment and the importance of sustainable practices in urban planning. To do this, the project will develop a weather and urban model that examines the interaction between the urban heat island, outdoor water, and air pollution. This model will provide understanding of how cities and their excess heat, vegetation irrigations and resuspended pollution particles can affect cloud formation, especially rainfall and storms. The project will focus on the city of Houston, where data collected during recent field campaigns, led by the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, have the potential to improve weather and urban models. By looking at various weather scenarios and factors, the research communities can get a more complete picture of the complex relationship between cities and weather. This new knowledge will also help improve climate adaptation and mitigation strategies and provide better support to urban communities and decision-makers.<br/><br/>This project targets at improving the fundamental understanding of the physics tied to how the urban environment modulates meteorology, including convection and precipitation. It addresses issues of multiscale atmospheric interactions, associating synoptic scale and mesoscale forcing with urban resolving processes in the Houston area. The use of new observationally based products from the DOE/ASR Tracking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment (TRACER) and NSF/Experiment of Sea Breeze Convection, Aerosols, Precipitation and Environment (ESCAPE), together with an Urban Modeling Systems that includes a newly developed urban irrigation module, cutting-edge urban-resolving, cloud-resolving, and aerosol-aware modeling, will provide a more complete and detailed characterization of the impacts of urbanization on meteorology. To gain a more general physical understanding of the key factors and processes involved this project will examine the range of behaviors under different synoptic settings. Research scientist from the Desert Research Institute, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the University of Houston will collaborate to develop the outlined urban modeling systems and enhance understanding of urbanization's impact on warm cloud-aerosol interactions.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.