The Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative integrated urban observing system

The Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative is an urban integrated field whose objective is to establish and apply the observations needed to improve urban climate and air quality projections and thus provide an improved scientific foundation for mitigation and adaptation planning. The urban system is complex and demands a multivariate observational approach.  BSEC brings together observations of the urban atmosphere, buildings, ecosystems, biogeochemistry and hydrology, providing an integrated view of the city environment.

Observations of buildings, soils and ecosystems provide both spatial data and process-oriented measurements needed to construct detailed models of the urban surface. Detailed building data and associated models expand our understanding of how infrastructure impacts the atmospheric environment, the sensitivity of the indoor environment to outdoor conditions, and options for adaptation to extreme heat and poor outdoor air quality. Ecosystems measurements provide data needed to test the representation of urban ecosystems in numerical models and improve our understanding of the impacts of urban greening. Urban soil and hydrology measurements provide a measure of realism needed when simulating the disturbed, complex urban subsurface. This suite of observations are being used to challenge land surface models used to represent cities in urban hydrology and numerical weather models.

Atmospheric observations include both the factors that impact human health and comfort, and the composition and dynamics of the atmospheric boundary layer.  Separate air quality and weather networks quantify the spatial and temporal variability of these properties across the city. An air quality supersite measures the atmospheric composition properties needed to evaluate and improve urban air quality models. Land-atmosphere flux measurements, surface-layer turbulence profiles, a Doppler lidar and periodic rawinsonde measurements document the temporal evolution of the atmospheric boundary layer.

This presentation will describe both the observational network and its application to evaluating the associated urban environmental models.