Urban Heat Island Community Science Campaigns

Organization: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Year: 2017 - present

NOAA, in a public-private partnership with CAPA Strartegies, LLC, runs annual community science Urban Heat Island mapping campaigns in cities across the United States. Each year, lea organizations in cities apply for core support funding for this activity. Residents of participating cities use low-cost in-situ sensors attached to their cars to drive transects and sample urban temperatures at a height of 2m. The in-situ data are combined with satellite data in a machine learning model to develop an estimate of the urban heat island intensity across the city. The outputs of the project are open source, and the outcomes of the project include community science engagement, education, and usable datasets showing the distribution of urban heat island intensity across the city.