Stanley Gedzelman, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at The Graduate Center and City College, is involved with several large research projects on climate and climate change. In one of the projects, funded by NASA-MUSPIN and carried out jointly with Professor Shermane Austin of Medgar Evers College, a network of weather stations operated by private weather aficionados, teachers, and students provides a picture of weather in the New York City Metropolitan Area with unprecedented detail. Weather phenomena such as the sea breeze, the Urban Heat Island (UHI) and the chilling springtime backdoor cold front, which have a major impact on local weather, are analyzed and modeled with greater accuracy than before so that local weather forecasts can also be more accurate. Another project falls under the aegis of the CCNY NOAA-CREST center directed by Reza Khanbilvardi, Professor of Engineering (Civil) and Earth and Environmental Sciences at The Graduate Center and City College. In this project, Dr. Gedzelman is working with a number of colleagues to pinpoint source and destination regions for pollutants that are injected into the atmosphere. The chemical compositions of the pollution particles are determined by Jeffrey Steiner of Earth and Environmental Sciences at The Graduate Center and City College, and the concentration of the particles is determined by remote sensing techniques developed cooperatively with Samir A. Ahmed, Fred Moshary, and Barry Gross, who all serve the faculty of the Ph.D. Program in Engineering (Electrical) at The Graduate Center and City College.
In another related effort a model has been developed that simulates, in color, atmospheric optical phenomena including coronas and glories. The appearance of these phenomena can be used to remotely determine the size distribution of droplets in a cloud.