Bridging the Heat Gap: Innovative Mapping and Community Engagement for Urban Heat Island Education

Extreme urban heat and the urban heat island (UHI) effect—where urban areas are significantly hotter than rural ones due to factors like impervious surfaces and reduced vegetation—pose serious health, economic, and environmental risks, particularly for vulnerable communities. Addressing and mitigating extreme urban heat is essential for urban sustainability and resilience. Traditionally, one of the first steps for cities attempting to mitigate extreme urban heat has been to map it within their municipality in order to identify target “hot spots” for mitigation and adaptational strategies to be implemented. This has historically been done through the use of in situ sensors, traverse campaigns, modeling techniques, or the use of satellite data products. However, these methods often aren't accessible to local community members, who may not understand the data, require higher resolution information, or have experiences that differ from what the data suggests. These barriers can render the data ineffective and potentially hinder long-term heat adaptation efforts. Additionally, the traditional techniques can be resource-intensive and technically demanding, making high-quality data collection difficult.

This presentation describes an effort to close these gaps and develop an accessible and usable methodology to map urban heat at a microclimate level, that can be easily performed by members of underserved communities. The methodology is flexible, prioritizing low-cost sensors and community-selected points of interest to map heat within a neighborhood context. A proof-of-concept activity was undertaken by students at The University of Texas at Austin in order to test the methodologies’ efficacy. Despite initial challenges with sensor use and general understanding of the science, the activity proved effective, with students identifying significant temperature variations across different surfaces and shaded versus unshaded areas. The thermal maps generated from this exercise have since been used by to advocate for increased shading infrastructure on campus. The study demonstrates the methodology’s utility in guiding urban heat mapping campaigns and empowering participants to engage with their environment critically. This project represents the first step in a multilayered process of improving upon this methodology and testing it in smaller communities both domestically and abroad to empower local communities globally to self-advocate for heat mitigation policies within their own communities.