creation of more forested areas within the urban areas. Because the trees absorb light energy to create food and expel latent energy from their leaves (transpiration), they help reduce the overall heat load of the area. What makes this condition so bad? Heat, a leading killer in the nation as the heat stores up in surfaces like asphalt, the temperature of the area remains elevated, even at night. This deprives the human body of the ability to cool down and increases the risk of illness. Another problem made worse is the creation of smog components. Smog is created when chemical elements common to the urban environment and heated causing an increase in the reactivity of these components, leading to enhanced smog formation.

We began our research in the lab-resourced with high speed computers and the latest updates of geographic information software programs. Also we were introduced to a new suite of programs known as ArcGIS. We used ArcMap to create maps such as Figure 1 to identify which areas are warmer than others and what environmental conditions corresponded with these increased temperatures. The primary condition investigated was the land cover distribution that was pre-classified within the National Land Cover Dataset from the USGS. These data were