Weekly Data Story
Today’s post was not planned to coincide with the sweltering conditions in Baltimore – we’re supposed to feel like 107 today!
Urban planners and the rest of the players responsible for designing cities intentionally do not want to design cities that are purposely suffocating their residents with high heat. As average temperatures continue to rise, cities across the world were not designed to mitigate this problem. The increased temperatures causes endless challenges for urban life: health problems, infrastructure disruptions, productivity loss, lower children test scores, air pollution, increasing costs and mortality to name a few factors.
Baltimore City is typical of many North American cities battling this problem. According to “The Guardian newspaper: “Stretches of hot weather in the city have become more frequent over the past 40 years. According to the National Weather Service, there are 12 months in all of Baltimore’s history that saw 20 or more days of 90-degree temperatures or above; 10 of those months have occurred since 1980.”- The Guardian.
Thanks to Ana Pinheiro Privette‘s work at Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative’s (ASDI) to distribute the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat collection, via Amazon Web Services (AWS), we leveraged that data to map the UHI for Baltimore City and a few things stood out to us (comparison between UHI and income) :
a. UHI covered a large portion of the city approximately 50%
b. Parks that appeared in the UHI showed substantial lower temperatures
c. Assumed canopy coverage in the city must be incredibly low
d. An inverse relationship seems to exist between temperature and income (lower temperatures equates higher incomes)
Authors: Jose Pillich & Ryan Kmetz
