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Engineered pavements cover a large fraction of cities and offer significant potential for urban heat island mitigation. Though rapidly increasing research efforts have been devoted to the study of pavement materials, thermal interactions between buildings and the ambient environment are mostly neglected. In this study, numerical models featuring a realistic representation of building-environment thermal interactions, were applied to quantify the effect of pavements on the urban thermal environment at multiple scales. It was found that performance of pavements inside the canyon was largely determined by the canyon geometry. In a high-density residential area, modifying pavements had insignificant effect on the wall temperature and building energy consumption. At a regional scale, various pavement types were also found to have a limited cooling effect on land surface temperature and 2-m air temperature for metropolitan Phoenix. In the context of global climate change, the effect of pavement was evaluated in terms of the equivalent CO2 emission. Equivalent CO2 emission offset by reflective pavements in urban canyons was only about 13.9e46.6% of that without building canopies, depending on the canyon geometry. This study revealed the importance of building-environment thermal interactions in determining thermal conditions inside the urban canopy.
The combined use of methamphetamine and opioids has been reported to be on the rise throughout the United States (U.S.). However, our knowledge of this phenomenon is largely based upon reported overdoses and overdose-related deaths, law enforcement seizures, and drug treatment records; data that are often slow, restricted, and only track a portion of the population participating in drug consumption activities. As an alternative, wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has the capability to track licit and illicit drug trends within an entire community, at a low cost and in near real-time, while providing anonymity to those contributing to the sewer shed. In this study, wastewater was collected from two Midwestern U.S. cities (2017-2019) and analyzed for the prevalence of methamphetamine and the opioids oxycodone, codeine, fentanyl, tramadol, hydrocodone, and hydromorphone. Monthly 24-hour time-weighted composite samples (n = 48) from each city were analyzed using isotope dilution liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. Results showed that methamphetamine and total opioid consumption (milligram morphine equivalents) in City 1 were strongly correlated only in 2017 (Spearman rank order correlation coefficient, ρ = 0.78), the relationship driven by fentanyl, hydrocodone, and hydromorphone. For City 2, methamphetamine and total opioid consumption were strongly positively correlated during the entire study (ρ = 0.54), with the correlations driven by hydrocodone and hydromorphone. In both cities, hydrocodone and hydromorphone mass loads were highly correlated, suggesting a parent and metabolite relationship. WBE provides important insights into licit and illicit drug consumption patterns in near real-time as they evolve; important information for community stakeholders in municipalities across the U.S.
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/komal-agrawal/AD_GIS.git