CROCUS Project Overview
Background
Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) is heading up the Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) team of leading climate scientists who will provide an extensible blueprint, in methodology and results, for climate studies in other major cities. The Chicago Region will serve as the Urban Integrated Field Laboratory (UIFL) for this project. The proposed site was reclaimed from a swamp and is nestled between the understudied, but critically important Lake Michigan and former prairieland that is now converted to agriculture. By addressing five community-driven objectives, CROCUS insights and tools will be vital to supporting future urban science and the needs of diverse communities and will inform the key objectives outlined in major regional climate planning documents.
The CROCUS UIFL will be a hallmark project that connects local and regional climate actions with scientific findings via long-standing community-research partnerships. Our modular, portable, and scalable Integrated Model-Observation-Experiment (ModEx) architecture will connect amicably with other UIFLs to co-produce knowledge and advance fundamental and community urban climate science.
PI: Dr. Cristina Negri, Argonne National Laboratory
Co-PI: Professor H.J.S Fernando, University of Notre Dame
CROCUS website at Argonne National Laboratory
Vision
- Advancing urban science in the diverse, highly heterogenous, human-altered region of Chicago as a playbook for extensibility to other major cities
- Leveraging extensive existing observational and modeling capabilities
- Empowering and actively involving diverse communities as part of the research team
- Enabling just, long-term societal benefits from climate
UIFL Outcomes
- Understanding of the climate vulnerabilities of heterogeneous urban areas that is applicable across the US
- Enhanced representation of urban processes in Earth system Models (ESM)
- Strategies for leveraging regional partnerships and investments by local governments
CROCUS Research Plan
Our plan delivers multiscale scientific observations informed by community needs and assessments of climate effects and mitigation impacts to enable community decision-making. (Courtesy: Argonne National Laboratory)