A Web-Based Geographic Information Platform to Support Urban Adaptation to Climate Change

Increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and increasing population growth in cities bring to the forefront the need to easily evaluate risks in urban landscapes regarding critical infrastructure and vulnerable populations. In this chapter, we present an integrated framework for an urban climate adaptation tool (Urban-CAT) that will help cities plan for, rather than react to, possible risks to urban infrastructure and populations due to climate change. The core of the framework focuses on reducing risk by bringing together disparate, high-resolution data of risk indicators to characterize urban landscape and to develop resilience profiles. Additionally, the framework integrates climate and population growth data to better understand future impacts of these stressors on urban resiliency to develop effective adaptation strategies aimed at reducing socioeconomic costs associated with extreme weather events. This framework requires integration of the multitude of disparate, high-resolution data for analysis in a dynamic web environment. We address how to achieve this integration through the development of a distributed, high-performance geoprocessing engine.