The problem to the Urban warming was approached from two directions. In the first approach, satellite data-specifically AVHRR data from the operational NOAA weather satellites-were used to observe the city of Atlanta. Because the polar orbiting satellite views Atlanta only twice per day, we employed a mesoscale with conventional surface and rawinsonde data, were used to initialize the model. Because the model's output is four dimensional (three spatial dimensions and time), the evolution of the urban warming effect can be studied in detail. The Scientific results of this study is presented in next section.

A problem with the above study is that the satellite can observe the surface temperatures needed for model initialization only when the sky is cloud free. We undertook a second study, using only conventional data, to determine the magnitude of the urban warming effect when the sky is cloudy.