CISL Seminar - The Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative: co-producing the science needed for urban climate resilience
1:00 – 2:00 pm MDT
Abstract
The Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative (BSEC) Urban Integrated Field Laboratory seeks a new paradigm for urban climate research. Motivated by deep uncertainties in urban climate and the future of urban systems, the BSEC team works collaboratively across research institutions and stakeholder groups to co-produce the science needed to advance energy security and resilience to extreme weather across the city. To do this, BSEC begins with stakeholder priorities (human health and safety, affordable energy, reliable transportation, and others) and designs observation networks and models that deliver the climate science capable of supporting those priorities. This means that BSEC takes the form of an iterative collaborative cycle, in which an initial observation and modeling strategy is continuously updated in conversation with community partners. The guiding objective of this cycle is to produce the urban climate science needed to inform “potential resilient pathways” for energy and infrastructure. In doing so, we address a number of fundamental urban science questions from across natural science and social science disciplines.
This seminar presentation will provide an overview of BSEC and draw out key examples of how it advances actionable climate science. I will highlight the use of high performance computing and advanced urban simulation in the project, and will consider ways in which these tools and techniques can most usefully be applied in transdisciplinary urban climate research.
Here is the public livestream link. Staff members can look for a Google Calendar invitation for the talk.
Please reach out to Sam Scalice (sscalice@ucar.edu) with any questions you may have.
Name
Ben Zaitchik
Ben Zaitchik is Chair of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Dr. Zaitchik was a Research Associate at NASA and a Foreign Affairs Officer at the US Department of State. He is the President-Elect of the American Geophysical Union and Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health, and he serves as the Principal Investigator for the Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative.