03 - Open Urban Science: Instrument Cookbooks for All

Presented by: Maxwell Grover

Abstract

The Community Research on Urban and Climate Science (CROCUS) project is a Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored Urban-Integrated Field Laboratory, focused on studying urban climate around the Chicagoland region. CROCUS connects local community organizations with scientists, focusing on climate impacts relevant to people living in these communities such as flooding, air quality, and extreme heat. A critical component to answering the core science questions is high quality observations. State-of-the-art instrumentation is being deployed within the local communities around Chicago, capable of measuring temperature, precipitation, and air quality. With these observations, it is imperative that the data and data processing procedure be open. We need community members to feel included in the process, and making data accessible and actionable to them is a critical requirement. The CROCUS team assembled open science cookbooks that detail the instrumentation used, show how to access the data, and contain recipes for scientific analysis. These cookbooks utilize existing open source software such as Jupyter Book and collaborate with the Pangeo Community’s educational group, Project Pythia. In addition to detailed scientific workflows, quicklooks of the data are stored using the same infrastructure, and linked on the project page, providing community members visualizations of current weather conditions. Instrument cookbooks serve as blueprints on how to observe urban climate systems, with detailed documentation related to instrumentation configuration and data provenance. We will discuss the lessons learned configuring the infrastructure, how community members and researchers have made use of the cookbooks, and future plans for improving our instrument cookbook ecosystem.