Ph.D. student David Miller received the William P. Lowry Graduate Student Prize, a prestigious award from the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the International Association for Urban Climate. David received the award for his talk entitled “Gross Primary Productivity of a Large Metropolitan Region in Midsummer Using High Spatial Resolution Satellite Imagery” at the 10th International Conference on Urban Climate (ICUC) and the AMS 14th Symposium on the Urban Environment, held August 6-10 in New York City. The ICUC is the largest and most important international scientific conference on urban climate science and it is held only once every three years. There were more than 600 delegates from 50 countries and over 200 student presentations in total.
The William P. Lowry Graduate Student Prize is given to the author with the best oral presentation in urban biometeorology or bioclimatology presented by a graduate student at the ICUC. As described by the Awards Committee, “The single work selected for this prize may be judged to be the most significant, innovative, seminal, groundbreaking, intellectually exemplary and/or integrative among those eligible.”
“David’s study is important because it quantified how the amount of atmospheric CO2 taken up by plant photosynthesis varies within each major urban vegetation type,” said his advisor Professor Joe McFadden. “This is a key step toward understanding the mechanisms, such as differences in fertilization, irrigation, and soil aeration, that cause CO2 uptake to vary and then predicting it across a large urban area,” said McFadden.
David’s paper on this study has been published in the journal Urban Ecosystems and it was downloaded over 210 times within the first month that is was published.
David Miller giving his presentation at the ICUC.
Miller used measurements of photosynthetic uptake of CO2 by urban vegetation from this flux tower in Minneapolis-Saint Paul to scale up to the entire city using satellite data.
