UIFL Coordination Activities Selected

Recognizing the value of increased collaboration among the Urban Integrated Field Laboratories (UIFLs), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently awarded supplemental funding for seven activities aimed at further strengthening UIFL coordination. These activities will enable UIFL teams to leverage capabilities, facilitate shared learning, and accelerate research advances across the four UIFLs.

The new activities follow the fall 2022 launch of the UIFLs and are awarded in response to the original UIFL funding opportunity announcement, which called for coordination among UIFLs and other BER-funded projects.

The activities selected for supplemental funding are:

  • Multi-Sector Dynamics Urban Working Group Cross-IFL Community Building
    • Provides a venue for early career UIFL researchers to share research challenges and discuss synergistic opportunities across projects through monthly webinars and discussions.
  • Unified Multilayer Interface for Cataloging Spatiotemporal Observation Across IFLs
    • Provides interactive data management services for nontraditional, cutting-edge collections of air quality–sensing data among UIFLs.
  • Green Infrastructure Representations in Hydrologic Models
    • Develops a shared understanding of and tools for representing how green infrastructure (e.g., permeable pavement, rain gardens, green roofs, and bioswales) affects the urban water cycle. Efforts will leverage UIFL modeling of green infrastructure, urban flooding, and urban stormwater contaminants.
  • Coordinating Urban Land Surface Modeling Across UIFLs
    • Establishes a working group among the UIFLs to coordinate land modeling datasets and analyses, facilitating cross-site synthesis of model projections and the ability to address urban research questions across different sites and geographical locations.
  • Coordinated Inter-IFL Measurements of Gas-Phase and Particle-Phase Pollutants in Joint Intensive Observation Periods
    • Allows UIFLs to coordinate simultaneous air quality measurement campaigns and share data and modeling results to compare outdoor and indoor air quality in vulnerable communities.
  • Greenhouse Gas, Criteria Air Pollutant, and Anthropogenic Heat Flux Inventories for the UIFL Domains at the Asset Scale
    • Creates high-resolution (asset-scale) inventories of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, criteria air pollutants, and heat fluxes for the UIFL domains.
  • Collaborative Evaluation of the Urban Integrated Field Laboratories Transdisciplinary Team Science
    • Assesses early UIFL transdisciplinary research in which researchers engage societal partners and stakeholders to increase these partners’ ability to use the research in practice and policy-making. Efforts will provide a better understanding of UIFL transdisciplinary activities, researcher and research team learning, and societal impacts.