‘Street scientists’ working to find hottest neighborhoods in Houston
Rachel Powers lured her 18year-old son out the door before sunrise Friday morning with promises of fresh doughnuts and environmental activism.
Together, the executive director of the Citizens’ Environmental Coalition and her son hopped into Powers’ blue Nissan Leaf and drove a zigzagging, preplanned route through Woodland Heights, Greater Heights and Northside Village.
While they drove, a small, blue rod attached to the window collected thousands of temperature, humidity and location data points. They took two more recordings on the same route by the end of the day.
This summer, Houston joins 13 other cities in a massive heat-mapping project. More than 80 volunteers such as Powers and her son, dubbed “street scientists” by the organizing groups, covered roughly 300 square miles in 32 polygonshaped areas.
The project, which is taking place when Houston and Harris County are usually at their hottest, will give scientists, public health officials and community leaders the data necessary to try to cool Houston down. Local leaders hope the heat maps will help direct policy and planning within neighborhoods for things such as cooling center locations, green space, green rooftops and tree planting. Continuously rising temperatures within cities such as
Houston can usher in a host of health and environmental problems and may disproportionately affect lower-income neighborhoods that tend to have less green infrastructure.
With the third most populous county in the nation, Harris County’s efforts represent one of the biggest single-day, community-led heat-mapping events ever held. Scientists say Houston heat-mapping has been done before, but this appears to be the first that will provide readily available, comprehensive data.
“This is something that, frankly, is a little bit overdue,” said Jaime González, Houston Healthy Cities program director at the Nature Conservancy in Texas, one of organizations participating in the project.
Indeed, last August was Houston’s second hottest on record, and experts predict it will continue to get hotter this year. By 2065, the number of days above a heat index — how hot it feels outside with added humidity — of 105 degrees is predicted to increase sevenfold. Houston is already at least 13 degrees hotter than nearby rural areas, according to Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization that analyzes and reports on climate science, and increasing temperatures put undue pressure on power grids.
Houston is undeniably hot, but some areas may be hotter than others. Infrastructure — treeless tracts, packed concrete apartment blocks, busy streets — can create conditions that could result in pockets with higher temperatures. Studies show that temperature discrepancies within a city can differ by 15 to 20 degrees, with more extreme heat often occurring in lower-income neighborhoods.
These heat maps will show quantitative data about urban neighborhoods and specifically which ones are more directly impacted by extreme heat.
Volunteers drove for an hour at 6 a.m., 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. collecting important data, which CAPA Strategies, an organization that tackles climate change, will then use as part of its Heat Watch program.
CAPA developed the program, which receives funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but Houston Harris Heat Action Team, or H3AT, organized the project locally. The team is a collaboration among four groups — Harris County Public Health, the Nature Conservancy in Texas, Houston Advanced Research Center, which studies energy, air, and water issues, and the city of Houston, which also worked on the project in partnership with Lowe’s and Shell.
Volunteering on foot
Antonio Martinez, one of the volunteers, lives in Gulfton but doesn’t drive a car. Instead, he spent the morning walking around with a thermal imaging camera taking heat sensor photos of different parts of the neighborhood where he has lived for almost 20 years.
Martinez, an English-language teacher, said he also works as a community educator and is determined to help children in his neighborhood — most of whom have immigrant parents — learn about conservation. As he walked, Martinez pointed out that many of the apartment buildings there were built in the 1970s and lacked good insulation, which makes them harder to cool down.
“We’re actually measuring what is being felt at the ground level,” said Marissa Aho, chief resilience officer for the city of Houston.
Scientists and policy experts will be able to directly compare neighborhoods and look at environmental justice and equity issues. Depending on the findings, the maps could also help inform infrastructure in lower-income areas, which Meredith Jennings, a postdoctoral research scientist at Houston Advanced Research Center, said have “traditionally been left out” of those discussions.
Aho would love to have a more equitable tree canopy across the
Houston area someday. But in order to make an effective change, scientists, officials and community leaders need hard data.
“For good public health work, we need good data,” said Jessica Abinnett, climate program director at Harris County Public Health. This data will help public health workers make data-driven decisions about which areas to prioritize when tackling urban heat.
‘Getting hotter’
Aho, who was Los Angeles’ first chief resilience officer, started working in Houston after Hurricane Harvey and recognized the intersectionality of environmental issues that plague Houstonians.
“The resilience work is really just trying to tie all of that together so that when we make an investment, it has as many co-benefits as possible,” she said.
“Houstonians do not prepare for heat like we prepare for hurricanes, but we should,” said Mayor Sylvester Turner in a news release. “Houston is getting hotter, and we need science and data to help identify where the greatest impacts are, so we can keep Houstonians safer and our city more resilient.”
After CAPA analyzes the data, it will be sent to Houston Advanced Research Center in October. Jennings and a mapping team there will overlay the data with other variables related to urban heat such as canopy cover, land development and land surface type.
The resulting data will be in the public domain — freely available to everyone, which will help inform projects such as those taken on by the Nature Conservancy and the Resilient Houston strategy.
This project may be repeated, but for now, Jennings said the data will be a good baseline.
González is eager to start employing the data. He hopes to have at least one project started by year’s end. “We don’t want to wait forever to have some solutions on the ground,” he said.
As Powers and her son wrapped up their first leg of data collection, the sun was just beginning to rise — and along with it, Houston’s temperature. Powers texted a picture of a thermostat at 10 a.m.
“The heat index right now is 105 in my neighborhood, which has a relatively high number of trees,” she wrote.