Building urban resilience by studying local climate change
The Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) is a flagship project from the U.S. Department of Energy to create a network of Urban Integrated Field Laboratories for the study of climate change in local urban communities across the U.S. The project is led by Argonne National Laboratory with the University of Chicago and other higher education institutions in the greater Chicago area, as well as four community partners. The Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation heads the University of Chicago’s affiliation with CROCUS.
CROCUS involves an exciting and diverse set of collaborations between university researchers, climate scientists, city officials, and community organizations to co-produce knowledge about local climate adaptation. CROCUS is designed to conduct novel observational science and create highly accurate climate models. This information will interact with the experience and priorities of local communities to generate new insights on current and future urban climate actions at the street, neighborhood, and regional levels.
Grants
Through CROCUS, the Mansueto Institute supports faculty research on grants and projects impacting cities. Learn more about our current grants.
Community Applications of Hyper-Local Urban Climate Data
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Marshini Chetty, Associate Professor of Computer Science
About
The goal of this research is to inform how urban communities can use hyper-local climate data. As climate change presents new threats to urban areas, understanding the weather is critical for both short-term planning as well as longer-term infrastructure investment decisions. Currently,weather is reported at a city-scale and weather reports are conveyed to Chicago residents via apps and websites. Using advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing, scientists at Argonne National Lab are developing a sensor network in Chicago to measure weather at a finer-grained, neighborhood-level scale through the Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) initiative. It is unclear, however, how this more localized climate data will be meaningfully conveyed to residents. Moreover, it is uncertain how urban residents can be integrated into, and benefit from, scientific AI systems such as this one. In this project, we seek to understand and prototype a way for Chicago communities to use this hyper-local climate data, with implications for the development of future AI systems in urban areas. We have partnered with the CROCUS team at Argonne National Lab as well as a Chatham community organization, where one of the CROCUS nodes will be deployed. We plan to run a series of co-design sessions with approximately 15 residents. These co-design sessions will focus on understanding climate-related needs and concerns in the neighborhood and iteratively develop an app that makes use of the hyper-local data. The deliverables for the project will be a publication as well as an app prototype.