The Polisphere: How Nature, Humans, and Infrastructure Shape an Emerging Earth System

Name: The Polisphere: How Nature, Humans, and Infrastructure Shape an Emerging Earth System
Start: 2026-03-23T10:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-03-23T11:00:00-04:00

Prof. Elie Bou-Zeid

Princeton University

Monday March 23, 2026, 2 PM ET

Abstract:

In 2025, over 80% of the world’s population lived in towns and cities that often agglomerate into large metropolitan areas. The population density — and associated infrastructure and resource needs — in these agglomerations create a new anthropogenic Earth system unlike any other. Understanding and managing this emerging “polisphere” has never been more urgent as these metropoles are fast becoming the center stage for confronting global challenges related to climate, population, resources, and equity, among others. Simultaneously, cities will bear the brunt of the confluence of climate and weather extremes, rapid technological shifts, and demographic change, along with the political, and socio-economic challenges they will bring about. Traditional geophysical research tools that would be used to address such a range of hazards are ill-suited for cities, challenged by extreme spatial and temporal variability and myriad multi-scale interacting natural and anthropogenic processes. Advancing urban science, planning, and management is thus triggering the development of new paradigms that fuse multiscale and multifidelity modeling and observations to understand how the polisphere interacts with other Earth systems, and to design more resilient, sustainable, equitable, and livable cities. This talk overviews some of the developments we have made in urban modeling and observations, focusing on applications related to urban overheating and air pollution.

Biosketch:

Elie Bou-Zeid is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University, where he also served as the founding director of the Metropolis Initiative for urban technology until 2022. His research broadly examines flow and turbulence in the atmospheric boundary layer, with a focus on heterogeneous and unsteady flows and on applications related to cities, renewable energy, and hydrometeorology. Bou-Zeid is the current chair of the Committee on Boundary Layers and Turbulence of the American Meteorological Society. He previously served as editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. He is the recipient of the 2025 Atmospheric Sciences Ascent Award from the American Geophysical Union and the 2026 Helmut E. Landsberg Award from the American Meteorological Society.