Fine Scale Mapping of the Manhattan Heat Island for Health Impacts

The definitive urban environment, Manhattan hosts a variety of micro-environments defined by parks, varying building heights, and proximity to water bodies. Fine scale temperature and humidity maps are necessary to understand how this variation on the neighborhood scale affects variations in microclimate. Backpack mounted data loggers have been deployed in a series of simultaneous parallel walks to measure temperature and humidity at rougly 10 meter intervals, categorized by segments of shade and direct insolation. Roughly 30 such campaigns should be completed by the end of the summer of 2013. The measurements are detrended in time against fixed meteorological stations, then normalized by the daily Manhattan-wide averages and standard deviations. The data show local temperature anomalies on the scale of several hundred meters that change location from day to day and are ascribed to the convective structure of the atmosphere. Upon averaging multiple days together the convective structure disappears and the remaining signal appears to be most strongly correlated to building height. The resulting temperature and humidity maps will be used for multiple variable regression against local variables of vegetation, building characteristics, and albedo to arrive at a formula for predicting micro variations in the urban heat island. Intended applications are predicting and mitigating heat related mortality.