A team of researchers from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill has placed sensors across the city of Durham to monitor the temperature trends and potentially learn how to save lives.
“Temperatures are already on record to outpace last summer in 2023, which already was the hottest year on record,” stated Dr. Angel Hsu, UNC-Chapel Hill Associate Professor of Public Policy and Environment. The project is funded by a $1.5 million grant from NASA designed to use satellite remote sensing data, community-collected temperature data, and machine learning to evaluate disparities in heat stress from environmental and climate injustices across the U.S.
The approximately 40 sensors that are spread throughout the city collect temperature and humidity data every ten minutes.
“Already from some of the data we’ve analyzed, it’s pretty alarming,” Hsu said. “We’ve already experienced two heat waves since we’ve been doing this study in June and it’s only the beginning of July.”
A particularly alarming trend is that nighttime temperatures are increasing much faster than daytime temperatures.
“At night, our bodies need to rest, they need to cool down from the exposure of heat during the day,” Hsu said. “And if those temperatures are continuing to go up, then our bodies can’t recover.”
Hsu hopes that the collected data could potentially save lives and protect citizens by providing more information for leaders to utilize in policy.
“I would not trust what you necessarily get from the weather station,” she said. “I’m sure we’ve all experienced as we’re walking in a downtown area or going to our cars walking through a parking lot that you’re not just feeling heat coming from the sun. You’re actually feeling a lot of heat that’s coming from the ground, from your car, from different surfaces within an urban area. And that is currently not being captured by data you get from your phone or from the weather station on your smartphone.”
The sensors will run until the end of August, 2024 and the team hopes to have some preliminary results to share with the community in September.