While it is well-known that housing prices generally increased in the United States (U.S.) during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no research conducted to understand the spatial patterns and heterogeneity of housing price changes in the U.S. real estate market during the crisis. There has been less attention on the consequences of this pandemic, in terms of the spatial distribution of housing price changes in the U.S. The objective of this study was to explore the spatial patterns and heterogeneous distribution of housing price change rates across different areas of the U.S. real estate market during the COVID-19 pandemic. We calculated the global Moran’s I, Anselin’s local Moran’s I, and Getis-Ord’s $G_i^{\ast }$ statistics of the housing price change rates in 2856 U.S. counties. The following two major findings were obtained: (1) The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis on housing price change varied across space in the U.S. The patterns not only differed from metropolitan areas to rural areas, but also varied from one metropolitan area to another. (2) It seems that COVID-19 made Americans more cautious about buying property in densely populated urban downtowns that had higher levels of virus infection; therefore, it was found that during the COVID-19 pandemic year of 2020–2021, the housing price hot spots were typically located in more affordable suburbs, smaller cities, and areas away from high-cost, high-density urban downtowns. This study may be helpful for understanding the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and the real estate market, as well as human behaviors in response to the pandemic.

COVID-19 has affected almost all sectors of the economy, including the real estate markets across different countries in the world. A rich body of literature has emerged in analyzing real estate market trends and revealing important information. However, few studies have used a spatial perspective to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on property values. The main purposes of this study are as follows: (1) to explore the spatial distribution and spatial patterns of housing price changes during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in the U.S. real estate market and (2) to model the spatially nonstationary relationships between the housing price change and COVID-19 characteristics. We find that housing price changes differ across space and appear associated with the spatial distribution of the COVID-19 case rates. The housing market volatility is amplified by the uneven distribution of some socioeconomic factors. The spatially uneven housing price changes may bring an uneven spillover effect to the rest of the economy and lead to divergence in economic growth across different areas.

The SARAL-AltiKa dataset was evaluated for refined offshore wind energy resources assessment and potential metocean monitoring capability in the Southern New England region. Surface wind speed and Significant Wave Height ($H_s$) products were assessed with corresponding variables from buoy observations for 2014–2019. To increase the sample size, this study analyzed and applied an approach to collect data around the reference buoys beyond the satellite footprint at the expense of a bias increment. The study corroborated the accuracy of the SARAL-AltiKa measurements for the offshore area of interest and added details for stations closer to the coast compared with past studies. A proportional bias with underestimation of high values of $H_s$ was found in coastal sites. Wind speed estimates on the other hand appear to be less sensitive to the closeness to the coast. The empirical relationship between wind strength and $H_s$ in the buoy observations is reproduced to a large extent by the AltiKa measurements in locations where land contamination is minimal. The histograms of surface wind and $H_s$ are well described by the Weibull distribution and the shape and scale parameters closely resemble those of the histograms of the collocated in situ observations. We use these results to extrapolate the winds to a target domain with no in situ observations for wind energy resource estimation.

Urban land use is constantly changing via human activities. These changes are recorded by imprint data. Traditionally, urban dynamics studies focus on two-dimensional spatiotemporal analysis. Based on our best knowledge, there is no study in the literature that uses imprint data for better understanding urban dynamics. In this research, we propose a spatial–temporal–semantic triple analytical framework to better understand urban dynamics by making full use of the imprint data, toponyms. The framework includes a text classification method and geographical analysis methods to understand urban dynamics in depth. Based on the inherent temporal and spatial information, we enrich semantic information with street names to explain urban dynamics in multiple dimensions. Taking Hangzhou city as an example, we used street names to reproduce the city changes over the past century. The results obtained through analysis of street names may accurately reflect the real development process of Hangzhou. This research demonstrates that imprint data left by urban development may play a pivotal role in better understanding urban dynamics.