Home Department:
Environmental & Ecological Engineering

Mentor / Lab:
Prof. Suresh Rao

Specific Research Area / Project:
Dynamics of fractal intra-urbanheat islets

Undergraduate Institution:
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), India

Lab / Personal work-related websites:

Personal Website

Research Profile:

I am a NASA Earth Science Fellow pursuing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. at Purdue University. I have a sustained interest in the complexity, inter-dependency, and dynamism of complex socio-technological urban systems, and am passionate about engineering smart, resilient cities. My research lies at the intersection of Statistical Physics, Complex Networks, Urban Meteorology, and Remote Sensing.

Cities are complex adaptive systems that are presented with several challenges. Among them, extreme heat is one of the deadliest that claims more lives annually than any other natural hazard. Increasing urban heat is a result of globally increasing temperatures combined with the locally exacerbated Urban Heat Island (UHI), a well-known phenomenon of elevated temperatures in the urban areas compared to its rural surroundings. However, significant thermal variability exists within the cities, which stems from the spatial heterogeneity of urban form and functions. To judiciously target the heat-stress mitigation resources, it is essential to identify the critical regions that warrant the most urgent attention. Towards that end, I work on characterizing the spatial complexity of intra-urban extreme heat clusters, that I refer to collectively as intra-urban heat islets.

About Me:

I come from India, where I have mostly lived in Ranchi - my hometown, and in Roorkee - during my undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering at IIT Roorkee. However, thanks to my parents' avid interest in traveling, I have been all around this incredibly diverse country. I highly recommend it to fellow travelers who love colors, noise, crowds, food, and affordability!

Ph.D. at Purdue for me has been a truly trans-disciplinary and nomadic experience, thanks to the amazing NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship, the wisdom and benevolence of my advisor - Prof. Suresh Rao, and of course, the cross-pollination of diverse ideas enabled by ESE! I have had the privilege to travel extensively for collaborations, workshops, and conferences. I believe that this freedom from traditional disciplinary boundaries and global exposure has molded my research philosophy greatly.

In the long-term, I am motivated to be a Professor at an esteemed research university and start a center for complex urban systems research with a specific emphasis on meteorological applications. I seek to build and lead an interdisciplinary research group modeled after the one I have had the pleasure to be a part of at Purdue. I wish to inspire many more inquisitive minds to ask and ponder over complex questions that are of great scientific and societal relevance and arm them with the right tools to address them.

Awards:

• NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship
• AMS Best Student Presentation Award

Publications:

• Shreevastava, A., Rao, P.S.C., & McGrath, G.S. (2019). Emergent self-similarity and scaling properties of fractal intra-urban heat islets for diverse global cities. Physical Reviews E. (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.100.032142)
• Shreevastava, A., Bhalachandran, S., McGrath, G.S., Huber, M., & Rao, P.S.C. (2019). Paradoxical impact of sprawling intra-Urban Heat Islets: Reducing mean surface temperatures while enhancing local extremes. Scientific Reports (in review). (https://eartharxiv.org/gxj9m/)
• Bhalachandran, S., Chavas, D.R., Marks, F.D., Dubey, S., Shreevastava, A., & Krishnamurti, T.N. (2019). Characterizing the energetics of multiscale asymmetries during tropical cyclone rapid intensity changes. Journal of Atmospheric Sciences (in review). (https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.03618#)
• Shreevastava, A., Rao, P.S.C., & McGrath, G.S. (2018, October). Spatial analysis of the Surface Urban Heat Island. Land Surface and Cryosphere Remote Sensing (Vol. 10777, p. 107770C). International Society for Optics and Photonics. (https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2501441)
• Ching, J., et al, including Shreevastava, A. (2018). WUDAPT: An urban weather, climate, and environmental modeling infrastructure for the Anthropocene. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 99(9), 1907-1924 (https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0236.1)

Presentations:

• Shreevastava, A., Rao, P.S.C., & McGrath, G.S. (2018, December). Fractal topography of the intra-urban thermal landscape. Nonlinear Geophysics. AGU Fall Meetings, Washington, DC.
• Shreevastava, A., McGrath, G., Rao, P.S.C. (2018, September) Spatial analysis of the Surface Urban Heat Island. SPIE Asia-Pacific Remote Sensing Conference, Honolulu, HI.
• Shreevastava, A., McGrath, G., Rao, P.S.C. (2017, December) Characterizing the intra-urban spatial structure of High Heat Stress Zones. Global Environment Change. AGU Fall meetings, New Orleans, LA.
• Shreevastava, A., Bhalachandran, S., Garcia-Dorado, I., Aliaga, D., and Niyogi, D. (2017, January) Incorporation of urban form and function for improved correlation between Land Use Types and Land Surface Temperatures. 13th Symposium of the Urban Environment. 97th AMS Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA. (Won the AMS Best Presentation Award)
• Shreevastava, A., Bhalachandran, S., Krueger, E., Rao, P.S.C., Modak, P., and Niyogi, D. (2017, January) A Resilience Analysis of 100 Climate Proofing Strategies of the C-40 Cities. 97th AMS Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA.

Leadership:

• I love to perform live music, and I am the singer/guitarist of an indo-western fusion band at Purdue called Tatvam. We are the winners of Purdue's Battle of Bands, and have performed several live sets at Purdue, Lafayette, Urbana Champaign, and Chicago. Visit our page at https://www.facebook.com/TatvamPurdue/ to catch some of our upcoming shows Lafayette Regional Science and Engineering Fair - Judge March 2018