COURAGEMOBILE

CoURAGE-Mobile lab deployment

23 July 2025 - 27 July 2025

Lead Scientist: Jie Zhang

Observatory: AMF (ARM Mobile Facility 1)

The CoURAGE Mobile Laboratory deployment in the Baltimore-Chesapeake Bay region is designed to characterize the spatial distribution of key atmospheric pollutants and to investigate interactions between urban emissions and the coastal bay environment. During this deployment, the mobile laboratory will conduct targeted measurements across Baltimore and surrounding areas, including transects along and around Chesapeake Bay, to capture fine-scale spatial variability in trace gases and aerosols that cannot be resolved by fixed-site monitoring networks.

This observational strategy aims to examine how urban outflow interacts with bay-land breezes, boundary-layer dynamics, and coastal meteorology, and how these processes influence pollutant transport, transformation, and accumulation in the urban-coastal transition zone. By providing high-time-resolution, spatially resolved measurements, the deployment will generate observational constraints on urban-bay exchange processes and pollution gradients relevant to both air quality and atmospheric chemistry.

The resulting data set will support the CoURAGE objectives by improving the representation of urban-coastal interactions in atmospheric models, enabling more accurate evaluation of model performance, and informing future modeling studies of coupled urban and bay processes in the Chesapeake Bay region.