Southwest Urban Corridor Integrated Field Laboratory (SW-IFL)

Southwest Urban Corridor Integrated Field Laboratory (SW-IFL) Southwest Urban Corridor Integrated Field Laboratory (SW-IFL) The Southwest Urban Integrated Field Laboratory (SW-IFL) will develop and deploy novel observational and modeling capabilities to improve understanding of fate and transport of heat and pollutants in the complex airshed of the growing urban megaregion that stretches across the state of Arizona from the Mexican border in the south to the Navajo Nation in the north. This region is particularly stressed by the complex interaction of extreme heat, air chemical composition, and their disproportionate impacts on vulnerable urban subpopulations. The integration of new observations with innovations in coupling models across scales will enable high resolution modeling that will assist decision-makers in developing and evaluating effective solutions to promote equitable policy interventions across the region. The SW-IFL will specifically advance urban systems science by: (1) improving our understanding of how the built environment affects local to regional climates, emissions, and air chemistry; (2) establishing empirically-grounded theory of how governance, actors, plans, and policies across scales shape resilience to heat; (3) by building a framework and simulation capability to facilitate equitable mitigation of extreme heat and its societal impacts via analysis of co-benefits and tradeoffs of sustainability outcomes and (4) engaging stakeholders who represent many scales of government and the community in an advising capacity in order to drive the research questions. Observations will leverage persistent observation networks, supplementing available data with unique and crucial measurements of land-atmosphere exchange processes, atmospheric composition, and biogenic and anthropogenic emissions. Intensive observational periods throughout the summer months (from hot/arid pre-monsoon months throughout the peak of the North American Monsoon season) will use dedicated mobile observatories to measure large-scale boundary-layer processes, and focused neighborhood-scale heavily-instrumented testbed experiments to elucidate drivers of microclimate variations. Next generation predictive modeling capabilities for urban regions will be developed by improving upon representation of fine-scale physical processes, while coupling existing state-of-the-art models that integrate human behavior and atmospheric phenomena ranging from neighborhood to regional scales. The SW-IFL will uniquely integrate local observational datasets with improvements in model parameterizations and coupling across scales to enable high resolution predictive capabilities, with a focus on extreme heat as a central driver of key environmental outcomes, including GHG emissions, urban water stress, and fate and transport of urban air pollutants. These new modeling capabilities will inform and enable the development of new resiliency toolkits that will empower not only government agencies but the public in equitable decision-making. The proposed effort in resilient solutions would not be possible without the new information that will be gathered through both the observational campaigns in the unique SW-IFL region, as well as the refinements that are proposed to the models.