Editor’s note (December 2, 2024): The story below originally published November 26, 2024. The Coast-Urban-Rural Atmospheric Gradient Experiment (CoURAGE) began official data collection December 1. See what data are now available in the ARM Data Center.
In and around Baltimore, Maryland, scientists, technicians, and students are poised for a year of measuring an urban atmosphere
Do you want more CoURAGE?
Atmospheric scientists do, especially those that study climate and weather patterns affecting urban areas around the world.
What they have in mind is CoURAGE, the Coast-Urban-Rural Atmospheric Gradient Experiment. This yearlong field campaign in and around Baltimore, Maryland, will begin data collection December 1, 2024.
CoURAGE’s principal investigator is Pennsylvania State University professor Kenneth Davis, who oversees a team of 27 co-investigators.
The source of the campaign’s core instrumentation is the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility. Instruments will measure properties of clouds, aerosols, precipitation, and solar and infrared energy at multiple sites.
Earth system models are not yet well adapted to predict climate and weather variability in cities. In part, that’s because robust, coordinated, and continuous field data in urban environments are hard to find.
CoURAGE was designed to help address this gap by taking detailed observations in and around Baltimore for a full year.
Continuous Atmospheric Data
CoURAGE and its city and regional partners will collect continuous atmospheric data from surface remote sensing instruments at four sites.
The main one, arrayed with instruments from an ARM Mobile Facility (AMF), is on the grounds of a former high school in Baltimore’s Clifton Park district. Three other sites will provide contextual city and upwind data: one urban, one rural, and one on Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean.
All year, meanwhile, radiosondes launched at regular intervals will provide data on vertical dimensions of the urbanized atmosphere. ARM is also planning tethered balloon system flights during the campaign.
Research flights with non-ARM crewed aircraft will occur during CoURAGE’s two intensive operational periods, which are scheduled for winter and summer 2025.
NOAA will take part through a series of Baltimore and Washington, D.C., flights already planned for its Airborne and Remote sensing Methane and Air Pollutant Surveys (AiRMAPS).
CoURAGE-related collaborations by other research aircraft are pending, including possible contributions from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
Scientific interest in the campaign is lively in other ways. On November 4, 2024, DOE announced a fiscal year 2025 funding opportunity through its Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program area. CoURAGE is one of the two research topics featured in the announcement. Pre-applications are due January 7, 2025.
Campaign Choreography
“When you are in theater and the show has to get out there, you have to drop stuff and make it happen. Field projects are the same way. You need to focus on the job and work together.”
The CoURAGE team seeks to measure the interconnected atmospheric components at play in urban environments. They include the nature of surfaces, aerosols, atmospheric chemistry, clouds, and patterns of precipitation.
Davis is an expert on the boundary layer, the first mile or so of the atmosphere. That’s where humanity resides, weather happens, and critical exchanges of water, energy, and wind-borne momentum take place between the Earth and thin shell of clouds and gases above it.
The science and the complex array of instruments from multiple partners can be a lot to coordinate.
Davis, who studied physics and choreography as an undergraduate at Princeton University, says he is grateful for the dance experience while planning CoURAGE.
“When you are in theater and the show has to get out there, you have to drop stuff and make it happen,” he says. “Field projects are the same way. You need to focus on the job and work together.”
An Urban Proxy
CoURAGE is designed to improve model simulations of the urban atmospheric boundary layer, including its regional influences.
“This is supposed to serve all cities, not just Baltimore,” says Davis.
But why choose Baltimore for this campaign?
For one, the city, in combination with its neighboring rural and marine influences, represents atmospheric conditions that exist in many coastal urban centers in the Earth’s midlatitudes.
The open ASR funding call points to common topics of scientific interest in such areas. They include the need to better understand the impacts of city land use and sea and land breezes on regional temperatures, aerosols, clouds, precipitation, boundary-layer processes, and convective storm activity and intensity.
Cities and their surroundings influence regional climate and weather patterns in ways that models struggle to express. Satellite data suggest that urbanized areas of 50,000 people or more create downwind anomalies in precipitation that open land does not.
Cities also create their own weather, often at the scale of a square mile or less. Paved areas create heat islands that spike local temperatures. Canyon-like clusters of tall buildings alter wind patterns. Trees and other vegetation have cooling effects.
“It’s a complex environment,” says Davis. “That makes it challenging to get everything right. Interesting geographic locations like this also happen to be complex meteorologically.”
BSEC Beginnings
Davis was also attracted to Baltimore because of its human resources: a pre-existing consortium of community and university partners interested in the urban environment, from soils to atmosphere.
In 2022, DOE announced it would fund Urban Integrated Field Laboratories (UIFLs) in Baltimore and three other areas in the United States.
UIFLs reflect an increased interest among scientists in how a warming world will affect cities, as well as how future changes in weather and climate patterns will affect society.
One of the UIFLs is CoURAGE’s main partner: the Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative (BSEC), which Davis says made the ARM campaign possible by laying the groundwork for community engagement and relevant science questions.
BSEC’s proposal to become a UIFL was finished in June 2022 and awarded that fall.
Shortly after, in December 2022, DOE put out a call for proposals to deploy an AMF in an urban environment. It was intended to support the heightened interest of DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research program in the science of urban regions and their interactions with the climate system.
The CoURAGE proposal, motivated by the synergy of BSEC and the urban AMF call, says Davis, was finished in March 2023.
BSEC’s role is to generate “the climate science required for equitable climate action in Baltimore and beyond,” says its principal investigator, Ben Zaitchik, a Johns Hopkins University professor and CoURAGE co-investigator.
That means working with city officials and community to arrive at research questions and deploying the measurement systems needed to address those questions, he says. “CoURAGE is a powerful complement to those efforts.”
Community Weather Stations
CoURAGE co-investigator Darryn Waugh, also a professor at Johns Hopkins, set up a BSEC weather station network that began operating across Baltimore in 2023.
Some of the nearly 40 stations measure ambient weather conditions; some measure and analyze precipitation, surface water, and groundwater; and some stations measure both.
Most of the stations are at churches, schools, community gardens, and parks.
The data collected are comprehensive, says Waugh: neighborhood-scale measurements of “temperature and moisture of the air, rainfall, wind speed and direction, surface pressure, and the amount of sunlight—the kind of data needed to understand the causes and develop equitable solutions.”
Beyond the network of BSEC weather stations, only one National Weather Service station operates in Baltimore, in the Inner Harbor, he says. That is not enough to record how heat and other conditions vary across the city.
ARM’s CoURAGE measurements will provide additional detailed observations of aerosols, clouds, and atmospheric profiles to help understand the atmospheric processes driving the BSEC observations.
Baltimore experiences periodic “extreme heat, flooding, air pollution,” and more, says Zaitchik, who will serve as president-elect of the American Geophysical Union for the 2025–2026 term. “CoURAGE provides a unique suite of measurements that get at the atmospheric dynamics and chemistry behind these experiences.”
The campaign, he adds, will also “dramatically extend the kinds of science questions that BSEC is able to consider.”
Area Professionals
Davis is grateful that CoURAGE is supported by BSEC’s commitment to community-engaged research.
“BSEC scientists regularly engage city stakeholders,” he says, including professionals from the Baltimore Office of Sustainability, the Baltimore City Department of Public Works, Old Goucher Community Association, and Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE).
An existing long-term observatory operated in Beltsville, Maryland, by MDE and Howard University will also supply CoURAGE data.
“CoURAGE will give MDE a better understanding of the three-dimensional feedback between the complex topography of the land-water-urban landscape and air quality,” said MDE air quality expert Joel Dreessen, “and how pollution and meteorology at the microscale result in intense gradients in air pollution, which can impact exposure and federal standard attainment in our region.”
Bringing in the Students
Most of all, CoURAGE is honey to busy-bee university students interested in science careers, including people from underrepresented groups.
Students from Morgan State and Howard—both historically Black universities—are involved in the campaign, as well as students from Johns Hopkins and Penn State.
“CoURAGE is a great opportunity for Morgan State University students to participate, observe, and be inspired by a scientific operation with real-world impacts,” says Xiaowen Li, who leads the university’s climate studies program. She is also the lead scientist working to support ARM’s core site in Clifton Park, which is owned by Morgan State.
Li’s students will launch year-round weather balloons to contribute data to the campaign.
During CoURAGE, she says, “Campaign site visits will be part of our teaching in earth science-related courses”—so students can “develop exciting projects” that use live ARM data.
Morgan State students will also do outreach for CoURAGE. For example, two undergraduates will coordinate and conduct site visits for local communities and K-12 students.
“Finally,” says Li, “there are initiatives to involve students from (Morgan State’s) School of Global Journalism and Communication,” who will report on CoURAGE and climate.
‘An Exciting Time’
“As a young academic, being affiliated with a campaign of this magnitude is invaluable for research and networking.”
Imagine, too, the thrill of CoURAGE for Jason Horne, a PhD student working with Davis at Penn State.
“As a young academic, being affiliated with a campaign of this magnitude is invaluable for research and networking,” he says.
During CoURAGE, Horne will travel the few hours from school to Baltimore “as much as possible,” he says. “Being there in person is critical for understanding how operations look on the ground and engaging with community members.”
Horne also represents another important feature of CoURAGE: its monthly virtual science meetings, which bring together dozens of researchers across the country—many of them early in their careers—for updates and discussions.
Out of those meetings came an initiative that Horne helps guide: an urban modeling group “to advance the science of land-atmosphere interactions in the urban environment,” he says. “Conversations about modeling the urban environment are essential, and many people are working on the topic. Still, there are not many collaborations of this scale within the states. CoURAGE and (the UIFLs) mark a big first step.”
In the future, Horne wants to expand the conversation beyond the Baltimore campaign, domestically and internationally, and perhaps work toward a model intercomparison project and new proposals.
“Overall,” says Horne, “being a young academic in urban research is an exciting time.”
All it took was CoURAGE.
# # #Author: Corydon Ireland, Staff Writer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
ARM is a DOE Office of Science user facility operated by nine DOE national laboratories.