Heat and Cities: Using vehicle-borne sensing to capture hyperlocal spatio-temporal urban thermal complexities

Abstract

Extreme heat events are becoming a growing concern for urban residents, with increased frequency and intensity. Understanding urban heat dynamics and thermal exposure is critical for identifying and mitigating heat hazards. Most studies of urban heat dynamics use satellite-derived or weather station data that are limited in temporal and spatial resolutions. Improving urban sustainability requires new ways to capture hyperlocal ambient air temperature (AAT) information within complex, built environments. Driveby-sensing offers great potential in capturing the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban heat.Our paper demonstrates the broader application of temporally dense hyperlocal AAT data obtained using a novel drive-by-sensing framework. Using 2 million AAT data points collected between May-September 2019, we examine the thermal complexities of a midsized city, including the spatio-temporal dynamics of hotspots and areas of extreme heat exposure. This high spatiotemporal dataset reveals differing heat profiles under different weather conditions and times of day, with temperature variations of up to 12°C between hot and cold spots. These hotspots move around the city and were not all found near urban cores. This drive-by-sensing approach has the potential to be scaled and used by government entities to make cities more heat resilient and sustainable.