Community-Led Heat Mapping

Most cities have less than a dozen active temperature and air quality sensors. Tens of square kilometers and thousands of people have to rely on a sensor or two to learn about their air. For a culture so reliant on analytics, American cities rarely have enough information to make evidence-based decisions.

How do we change that? In 2018, the climate firm CAPA Strategies, of which Professor Shandas is a senior advisor, created the Heat Watch program to start bridging that information gap. Here’s how it works:

• After a community reaches out, CAPA Strategies provides training and materials to local champions for context on the importance of heat mapping
• On a designated hot day, CAPA Strategies provides low-cost, research-grade sensors to community volunteers who attach them to their cars, bikes, or backpacks
• Volunteers follow pre-mapped transects through their city, collecting temperature and humidity data along the way
• The routes are driven/biked/walked once in the morning, afternoon, and evening

In one fell swoop, volunteers collect hundreds of thousands of geo-located data points. The end product is a high-resolution data set of air temperature and humidity, and a report by CAPA Strategies with a detailed analysis of the distribution of heat throughout the community.

“The resolution of data has been revolutionary for the work we are doing. It helps us understand what an individual is experiencing. What is the air under their nose like? What is the temperature on the skin?”

– Vivek Shandas

This hyper-local data helps city staff and community members see their neighborhoods differently. With a clear picture of how heat is concentrated in certain areas, the question then becomes, what can they DO about it? How can they redesign infrastructure to make greenspace more present in their lives? Where can more space be made for trees?

“It has been an overwhelmingly compelling experience for me to see how little bits of granular data and a systematic process can get folks really charged and activated to bring more greenspace into cities,” said Vivek. These campaigns provide scientific backing to people’s lived experiences. It’s what has made the Heat Watch campaigns so powerful. It’s not an outside organization making maps for residents. The citizens living in these heat islands get to create their own evidence base and then use that to advocate for change.