Extreme heat waves hitting Texas are prompting Dallas to start mapping out the city’s worst hotspots in an effort to make them more heat resilient.
The city is collaborating with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to collect data in high-risk areas of intense heat.
Dallas senior environmental coordinator Kevin Overton says "urban heat islands” are growing in major cities with a lot of concrete structures.
“The urban heat island is what happens when you have a high density of pavement, concrete, asphalt and a low density of vegetation,” Overton said.
“It can be up to 20 degrees hotter because of that ground cover, since the different the buildings and everything is over a natural area.”
The city and NOAA are asking for 100 volunteers to drive around neighborhoods with heat sensors attached to their cars to record data on the vehicle’s mounted sensors record temperature, time, humidity, and the vehicle’s location. (examples). The study covers 15 routes over 100 square miles in Dallas at three times of the day of Aug.5. Volunteers need their own vehicle, but the city is providing the sensors and routes.
This is the seventh year NOAA has mapped urban heat islands with the objective of combating extreme heat, which the agency notes has been the No. 1 weather-related cause of death in the U.S. for the past three decades.
Carlos Evans, the director of the Office of Environmental Quality and Sustainability says the data will be analyzed and used to influence future policy.
“The ultimate goal here is to identify our islands so that we can provide that information to our policymakers, to help implement cooling strategies like planting trees, advancing smart surfaces like cool pavements, cool rooftops, green rooftops and the like,” Evans said.
