Community Research on Climate and Urban Science Urban Integrated Field Laboratory

Authors

Cristina Negri¹* (negri@anl.gov), R. Kotamarthi¹, S. Collis¹, Ashish Sharma^1,2, 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

• https://www.anl.gov/crocus

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.