Community Research on Climate and Urban Science Urban Integrated Field Laboratory
Authors
Cristina Negri1* ([email protected]), R. Kotamarthi1, S. Collis1, Ashish Sharma1,2, R. Grange1, G. Crabtree1, M. Berkelhammer3, M. Gonzalez-Meler3, T. Gala4, M. Potter5, Y.L. Lin6, G. Anderson7, N. Madina8, N. Fears9, E. Makra10, Ralph Cintron11, A. Packman12, H. Fernando13, S. Nesbitt14, Dev Niyogi15, T. Wagner16, J. Wang17, L. Bettencourt18, A. Martilli19
Institutions
1Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL; 2Discovery Partners Institute, Chicago, IL; 3University of Illinois–Chicago, IL; 4Chicago State University, Chicago, IL; 5City Colleges of Chicago, Chicago, IL; 6North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro, NC; 7Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, IL; 8Blacks in Green, Chicago, IL; 9Greater Chatham Initiative, Chicago, IL; 10Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, Chicago, IL; 11Puerto Rican Agenda, Chicago, IL; 12Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; 13University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN; 14University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign, IL; 15University of Texas–Austin, TX; 16University of Wisconsin–Madison, WI; 17Washington University–St. Louis, MO; 18University of Chicago, Chicago, IL; 19Centre for Energy, Environmental, and Technological Research, Madrid, Spain
URLs
Abstract
The Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) Urban Integrated Field Laboratory aims to advance urban science in the diverse, highly heterogenous, human-altered Chicago region. It leverages existing, long-standing, and extensive observational and modeling capabilities from the team and empowers and actively involves diverse communities as part of the research team to facilitate just, long-term societal benefits from climate mitigation and adaptation. The Chicago region is nestled between the understudied but critically important Lake Michigan and former prairieland now converted to agriculture. Its socioeconomic and environmental inequalities are rooted in practices that date back to the early 1900s. CROCUS addresses science questions that have been formulated with critical community input. For example, how do urban environments influence urban heat islands; precipitation intensity, frequency, and duration; and uncertainties from the contrasting impacts of lake effects? How do neighborhood characteristics, vegetation, and soil properties influence the local climate? How can participatory, community-driven research integrate local knowledge with scientific processes to generate improved understanding of challenges, complexities, and aspirations of urban residents? To answer these questions CROCUS has developed a modular, portable, and scalable integrated ModEx architecture, inclusive of a micronet, specialized field campaigns, extensive collection of existing data, and citizen science to support and interact with multiscale modeling. Information provided by communities frames a systems-based approach to evaluate different mitigation and adaptation technologies and scenarios and enables the understanding of the impact of these decisions on climate and communities. CROCUS investigates scalability from street-scale, local to global climate models and researches best practices to address urban sustainability with distributed and equitable solutions.