The 2025 CROCUS Urban Flooding and Rainfall Campaign

The United States Department of Energy-funded Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) Urban Integrated Field Laboratory is a multi-year intensive research program that integrates long-term instrumentation deployments, intensive field observations, and multi-scale modeling efforts across the greater Chicago region to study the community-scale physics and impacts of extreme weather and climate events. Set to occur in the spring of 2025, the CROCUS Urban Flooding and Rainfall Campaign is the second intensive field observation effort. The campaign’s goal is to use novel observational strategies to characterize hydroclimate dynamics from the subsurface through the troposphere before, during, and after flooding events in Chicago to enable physical and agent-based modeling, assess the performance of flood management infrastructure, and improve the resilience of Chicago-area residents to extreme precipitation events.  

Conducted in partnership with organizations within and around the city of Chicago, this campaign will collect a suite of subsurface, surface, and remote sensing observations at high temporal and spatial scales to benchmark remote sensing, parameterize multi-scale atmospheric and hydrologic models, and provide detailed data mapping for decision-making around the heterogeneity of the region’s flood response. Long-term monitoring of the subsurface and surface conditions across the region will be augmented by targeted soil characterization and soil moisture measurements and the deployment of an X-Band radar, soundings, lidars, and radiometers. Together, these observations will be used to drive coupled models to better understand the drivers for extreme precipitation in an urban setting, as well impacts of heavy precipitation on urban communities. These data collection efforts are embedded within Chicago neighborhoods and neighboring communities, and are thus critically coordinated with education and community engagement efforts to develop the scientific inquiry and build capacity within heavily impacted communities.