Urban Heat Islands Maya Jackson, Junior, Edison High School, California Jeremy Sandifer, STEM Project Coordinator, CAFSSS Dr. Buddhi Gyawali, Assistant Professor and SAP Director, CAFSSS
Introduction
What is the Urban Heat Island? Urban Heat Islands are relatively warmer areas in the inner city that are caused by human activities. Urban heat Islands are very important because they play an important role in the quality of our environment. Urban heat islands can affect many things such as growing conditions of vegetation and human health. It affects us in the summertime because it increases summertime temperatures (EPA 2015) and can lead to heat related illnesses during heat waves.
For this project we looked at different places to observe the relative distribution of increased temperatures. We used ArcMap to combine various environmental data to assess the degree to which the temperature distributions match the local distribution of impervious urban developments. We also made thermal maps that showed us urban and rural temperatures and calculated the difference between each to define the urban heat island magnitude. The team also looked at land cover distributions (Figure 1) to try and explain its relationship to urban heat distribution (Figure 2) derived from MODIS satellite imagery.