April 2025
Summary
As detailed in this report, BSEC research work over the past four months has spanned all scientific themes in the project. These include a maintained focus on measurement, modeling, and analysis to address fundamental questions of weather-related hazards in urban environments. In this third year of BSEC, these activities are increasingly yielding outputs that are directly informed by the place-based knowledge of the Steering Committee and the broader network of Baltimore stakeholders engaged in BSEC.
For example, in the area of atmospheric sciences, our Baltimore community weather station network has continued to provide critical data on neighborhood-scale weather variability in Baltimore, including during extreme events. The network, which has been co-designed with partners from across the metropolitan area and is implemented by community partners who host weather stations on their property, now has over 50 stations and is still growing. Results from the past year of weather monitoring are summarized in a manuscript that was recently submitted for publication in a scientific journal. This manuscript includes 32 co-authors, half of whom are community members who have participated in establishing the network.
In the area of residential buildings and energy, work to customize advanced building energy models for Baltimore rowhomes has yielded important results on heat risk and energy burden associated with unimproved and retrofit rowhomes under different microclimate conditions and future weather scenarios. These results point to the opportunity to reduce energy burden through targeted interventions for residents most vulnerable to poor indoor environmental conditions, and they also point to some risks associated with retrofits performed in the absence of complementary energy access interventions. For example, rowhomes in certain locations might become more vulnerable to unsafe indoor heat conditions if retrofits are performed without an increase in access to affordable cooling options. These results have been presented to BGE and will provide input for ongoing conversations with relevant Baltimore City agencies and developers.
Work on flood risk continues, with the strong support of the Steering Committee and other community partners. Morgan State researchers have developed community engagement events and surveys to use in evaluating flood model results and assessing potential interventions. This work is complementary to collaborative hydrological modeling performed with Baltimore DPW, as DPW also lacks community-based information on various types of flood risk across the city. Better information on flood occurrence feeds into the multiobjective flood mitigation analysis tool that BSEC is currently developing and will introduce to stakeholder workshops in coming months.
BSEC also continues to work to characterize methane concentrations across the city, an issue that is of considerable stakeholder interest because leaky natural gas infrastructure is likely the leading source of elevated methane concentrations. This has implications for energy security, air quality, and public safety, and in recent months the air quality and biogeochemistry teams have made progress towards detailed maps of methane hotspots in the city.
One final highlight to note: CoURAGE, the intensive atmospheric measurement campaign that is a sister project to BSEC, got underway in December 2024. There are now several months of data available, and they are yielding interesting preliminary results. For example, relationships between the Bay breeze and air pollution concentrations are appearing in these records that were not previously appreciated. There will be continued CoURAGE activities this spring and summer. This includes BSEC-mediated education and outreach that brings students and community members to CoURAGE sites to observe weather balloon launches and to learn about research instrumentation. It also includes several aircraft campaigns from NOAA and NASA that are planned to take place in coordination with CoURAGE activities. While recent instability in Federal science activities may affect those plans, they are still on the books. BSEC will provide the Steering Committee with updates on those air campaigns as they become available.