CoURAGE! An Atmospheric Campaign to Advance Our Understanding of Urban Climate and Air Quality in Complex Regional Environments

Understanding the mechanisms governing the urban atmospheric environment is critical for informing urban populations regarding the impacts of climate change and associated mitigation and adaptation measures. The Coast-Urban-Rural Atmospheric Gradient Experiment (CoURAGE) will deploy one of the Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Mobile Facilities (MF) to the MidAtlantic region surrounding the city of Baltimore in the fall of 2024. The deployment of this ARM Core facility will complement the Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative (BSEC), a DOE urban integrated field laboratory (UIFL). Ancillary sites will be deployed to rural Maryland, northwest of the city, and to a point on an island within the Chesapeake Bay. These observations will complement a long-term atmospheric observatory operated in Beltsville, Maryland by Howard University and the Maryland Department of the Environment. This deployment will create a four-node regional atmospheric observatory network including Baltimore and its three primary surrounding environments - rural, urban and Bay.

CoURAGE investigators will study the interactions among the earth’s surface, the atmospheric boundary layer, aerosols and atmospheric composition, clouds, radiation and precipitation at each site, and examine how the spatial gradients across the region interact to create the climate conditions in Baltimore. We will also determine how much the city of Baltimore alters its own atmospheric environment, and the degree to which conditions in Baltimore are dependent on the surrounding environment. Further, we will examine the potential of urban management to improve Baltimore’s atmospheric environment in the future, and the ability of our numerical modeling systems to reproduce these interactions and thus guide urban adaptation and mitigation efforts. Understanding this integrated coast-urban-rural system quantitatively and with good accuracy and precision is critical to informing climate adaptation and mitigation efforts in the city of Baltimore. The understanding gained should be applicable to many similar coastal, midlatitude urban centers.

This presentation will describe the CoURAGE science plan, and the observational and numerical resources arrayed to address the scientific objectives. We will invite collaboration and outline the abundant opportunities provided by this unique urban atmospheric experiment.