The volunteers fanned out across cities from Boston to Honolulu this summer, with inexpensive thermal monitors resembling tiny periscopes attached to their vehicles to collect data on street-level temperatures.
The volunteers fanned out across cities from Boston to Honolulu this summer, with inexpensive thermal monitors resembling tiny periscopes attached to their vehicles to collect data on street-level temperatures. Signs on their cars announcing “Science Project in Progress” explained their plodding pace — no more than 30 miles-per-hour to capture the dramatic temperature differences from tree-shaded parks to sun-baked parking lots to skyscraper-dominated downtowns.
The work of these citizen scientists is part of a new way of studying the urban heat island effect, with volunteers mapping two dozen cities worldwide in recent years. Past studies of urban heat islands — in which metropolitan areas experience significantly higher temperatures than their surroundings — have relied on satellite data that measures the temperature reflected off rooftops and streets. But Vivek Shandas, a professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University in Oregon and a researcher leading the project, says the urban heat island effect is more complicated and subtler than satellite data indicates.
“There’s much more nuance within the city,” Shandas says. “What we’re finding is that there’s upwards of 15- to 20-degree Fahrenheit differences within a city. In fact, a city could have the same temperature reading in one area as its rural or forested counterpart.”
Read more at Yale Environment 360
Photo credit: vargazs via Pixabay
