BALTIMORE — A new group called theBaltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative will bring together seven East Coast universities to study the impact of climate change on Baltimore.
The collaborative is led by Johns Hopkins University and brings together researchers from seven institutions - Johns Hopkins, Morgan State University, Penn State University, UMBC, University of Virginia, Drexel University and City University of New York - to help find solutions to climate change.
Morgan State University announced todaythat it got a $5 million federal grant for its part in the group. It's part of a $25 million, five-year funding package from the U.S. Department of Energy to create the collaborative, which is called an "urban integrated field laboratory."
Residents might see evidence of the team's work through items like sensors in stream-sampling stations in the Gwynns Falls watershed, a Doppler LiDAR system downtown to analyze the wind, a sonic ranging unit that measures the impact of Chesapeake Bay breezes, and tower-mounted sensors to track how the exchange of heat and water is affected by the urban surface in Baltimore.
The group says the focus on Baltimore is because it's "a metropolitan area that is representative of the climate challenges faced by many mid-sized industrial cities in the United States, and in particular with eastern 'rust belt' cities that face interlinked challenges of aging infrastructure, stagnant populations, increased heat and flood risk, and inequitable burdens of air and water pollution."
"These cities are challenging and critical places for equitable climate solutions... We will deploy advanced urban environmental measurement networks combined with the best urban models available... We will also establish a new generation of urban climate scientists and urban modeling systems capable of supporting predictions and community planning across a wide range of urban areas."
Morgan's research team specifically will "develop Earth and environmental systems models," with the goal of helping cities better handle the effects of climate change "while prioritizing investments in historically underserved communities."
"This project has the potential to create a new paradigm for urban planning," said the team's leader, associate civil engineering professor James Hunter, in a press release.
Johns Hopkins notes that the collaborative is part of the Department of Energy's funding of urban field laboratories to do climate research. The DOE announced last year it would give $84 million to better study how climate change affects urban areas.
