More than half of the world’s current population live in cities, which account for nearly 70% of the gross domestic product. However, our cities are unready to meet the overwhelming challenges of the 21st century: particularly the triad of energy security, health & environmental sustainability and climate resiliency. The key to solving these challenges, relies on resolving the dynamic and thermodynamic interactions within the urban environment. Urban areas are influenced by high degree of surface roughness, significant contribution through sensible & storage heat flux, diurnal shifts in wind pattern and source/sink heterogeneity. These distinct characteristics limit the applicability of conventional methods and theories. Here we look at how state of the art urban sensing – both ground & satellite based- and building scale energy-climate models can help us to understand and characterize the human-climate feedback in urbanized areas.