Video Excerpt: Project Stop the Heat

- [Narrator] There's a lot of weather data available.
You can easily access a prediction of what your week is gonna be like, sometimes down to the hour.
- But the data that we have to measure temperature is from our cell phones, from weather stations.
That data is very sparse, and it represents generally large areas.
As we walk through an urban area, we may go under some trees, and it's really shady and cooler.
We may walk across that parking lot surface, it's much hotter.
We experience temperature variably throughout an urban area.
The problem is, is that the existing data from weather stations is not fine enough to actually measure those differences.
- Let's go attach this to your car.
- Yeah, let's do it.
- [Narrator] To better understand the true exposure and experience of heat in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, the Museum of Life and Science partnered with local organizations and communities to take on the ground measurements of heat, in the summer of 2021.
- [Max] So this project is a little bit different from perhaps a traditional scientific study in that so much of the data collection, and then a lot of the analysis afterwards, is going to be done, and publicly owned and available, by the people that live there.
- It's really important to know that anybody can be a scientist.
You don't need a PhD to do science.
So what we're trying to do is empower these community members to study their community.
And hopefully with these data, then they can enact some policies, or plans to help mitigate their heat stress - [Narrator] Routes throughout the cities were developed with community input.
And then volunteers carried sensors along those routes three times during the sampling day, morning, midday, and evening.
Data was collected by a car, by bike, and on foot.
The data collected painted a powerful picture.
- The data did indeed show that there were urban heat islands.
It also found that there are existing heat disparities on that neighborhood by neighborhood, or sometimes block by block level.
July 23rd was around 88, 89 degrees, which is pretty much the typical summer day that you'd expect here in central North Carolina.
On that day, in the evening, we reached a temperature difference of about 11 degrees, which is a pretty remarkable finding.
It means that within our study area, and indeed here in Durham, some neighborhoods, sometimes only miles apart, were 11 degrees warmer than neighborhoods that were close by to them.
A lot of what we have found is that if you live in an urban area you're not just doomed to live in a warmer area.
There are pockets, individual small level areas, that are warmer than other parts of the urban area.
- [Narrator] UNC Chapel Hill's data driven Enviro Policy Lab facilitated a hackathon, where people dug deeper into the data.
- The idea of a data science hackathon is to open up the data, get mentors, people who are climate scientists, or have some knowledge about urban heat, or public health, and get people together to try to come up with creative solutions, data analysis, visualization, to help better understand the problem of urban heat exposure, and what we can do about it.
Globally, 65% of people will live in cities by 2030.
And that number will just continue to increase over time.
It's gonna become an increasingly important issue for citizens and policy makers to be aware of, and to do something about.
- [Max] Equitable planning, to make sure that we are not only dealing with these urban heat islands, but also dealing with it in a responsible way, means making sure that we include residents in the phases of planning, so that whatever happens in these areas is led by their priorities and their preferences.