EAGER: A Sensor Cloud-based Community-Centric Approach for Analyzing and Mitigating Urban Heat Hazards

This project analyzes how smart and pervasive devices including human and vehicle-borne sensors can be harnessed to effectively map and identify urban heat islands (UHIs), and mitigate UHI associated risks on various communities. Excessive generation and retention of heat in urban areas by the built environment results in UHIs. Driven by climate change, extreme heat events are increasingly posing a major health hazard to many urban communities in U.S. and around the world. Studies analyzing the impact of UHIs on communities have primarily focused on generating coarse grained heat maps of cities using satellite or weather station data, and correlating heat events with human mortality and morbidity data. This exploratory project is aimed at developing and testing a prototype community-centric approach to urban heat vulnerability research. Focusing on heat stress exposure risks of individuals and communities in fine-granular geographical areas will radically transform UHI research and efforts to mitigate them. The initial findings from this study indicates that a dynamic heat map for an urban area would be extremely useful for understanding the heat exposure vulnerabilities of individual communities such as people living in poorly-planned neighborhoods, poor and elderly, city and municipal outdoor workers, construction workers, bus commuters, and mail delivery personnel. Furthermore, this study will lay the foundation for city/local government officials and business leaders to devise targeted and more efficacious heat hazard mitigation efforts such as increasing greenspace and developing better heat-safety policies for their workers.