This researcher wants to get people heat data specific to their neighborhoods

Lots of us check the weather forecasts this time of year with a sense of dread. The 10-day outlook can look like a lot of 100s.

But Ashish Sharma says it would be more helpful if we could see more dynamic and localized heat data.

Sharma leads the climate and sustainability program at Discovery Partners Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and wants to find ways to get people heat information that is more specific to particular locations at particular times, rather than a static kind of map.

Sharma joins The Show to talk more about it.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Ashish, why is it important for people in a particular neighborhood to know it’s going to be this temperature at this time of day?

ASHISH SHARMA: Well, if you look at within a day, like in 24 hours, the temperatures in Phoenix will not always be 110 degrees or above 100 degrees. There would be windows of time when the temperatures would be very high, and there would be times when the temperatures would be cooler, relatively speaking.

So, if we can tell communities that these are the times during the day when the heat exposure could be a lot more and then you can take advisories during those times, that would be really helpful for communities. At the same time, if communities are thinking that they’re always vulnerable to heat, I think that might not always be true. There could be variations within the 24 hours, within the seasons when the communities are more vulnerable and when they’re less vulnerable.

MARK BRODIE: Is it kind of like, you know, a lot of people know that, you know, for example, if you go out maybe after, you know, when the sun starts going down or go down in the evening, it’ll be a little bit cooler. Is that kind of the thing you’re talking about, a way to make sure people can still get outside when it’s really hot, but maybe not at the hottest time of the day?

ASHISH SHARMA: Yes. So, you can tell them, "This is the hot period of the day. Maybe you should avoid going out." I’ll give you a few examples. If, say, you are in office and in the afternoon you want to take a break, you might want not to go on east side of the building, because you know this side of the building is relatively hot. Maybe take a walk on the other side of the building where it’s cooler. So how can we provide much more granular information and advisories for people to think about heat as a solution?

MARK BRODIE: Well, so how do you go about trying to gather and then provide that kind of granular data in terms of what the temperature is or might be in a very sort of hyper-local part of a community?

ASHISH SHARMA: Yeah, that’s a very good question. And what we do, I can give examples from Illinois. This is something that we have started doing. We are providing active weather forecast for the whole state of Illinois. We are going down to very high resolutions to neighborhood scales so that we can predict what the temperature would be. And in all fairness, it’s not just temperature. It’s the heat stress or heat index, as you can think of.

So let’s break it down into three parts. First is purely the temperature, so that you measure on a thermometer. Other one could be the heat index. Heat index is what National Weather Service many times share, which is a combination of temperature and relative humidity. And the third one could be what the body feels as heat. What that means is, is a variable that is a combination of temperature, relative humidity, winds and solar radiation.

So when all these four values are combined, then you can see how much a body will feel heat exposure. So if you can provide that kind of information to people at a very high resolution, not just a static map. Because if you look at traditionally what we have done as a community is we say, "This is the heat map generally for Phoenix. This is how the heat stress, or if you go a step forward combining with social vulnerability, heat vulnerability map for Phoenix area or Chicago area, and we use that to develop policies."

But in reality, that map is not always true. That map can be used as a proxy when you’re thinking of long-term planning, but when you’re looking at emergency management or operational planning, we might need to look at it in a very dynamic fashion: where the heat gets stagnant, where it moves from one location to another because of local advection or, in Phoenix, for example, valley flows that happens within the Valley, so the heat distributions might change.

Fred Zwicky

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University of Illinois News Bureau

MARK BRODIE: Are there ways that you could imagine that policymakers would maybe find this kind of information handy as well?

ASHISH SHARMA: Yeah, you can visit our website on the product that we have created, but I think there are a lot of few examples that you can think of from other parts of the world that we should think of incorporating. If I reflect back on what we in the U.S. do and what other global economies or countries are looking at and doing creating solutions, one thing is we need to think a little bit outside the box.

For example, in the U.S. we always think about engineered solutions. Where could we put sprinklers, misters, and where could we put cool roofs, where could we put reflective roads? And so on. A lot of engineered solutions. But if you go to Europe or Asian countries, you might see, in addition to these, they’re also looking at many cost-effective solutions that we might want to adapt. And those could be related to behavioral choices.

For example, having advisories that says, "OK, it’s a heatwave period. We encourage communities and people to wear light-colored clothes." That might really help communities. How many ads or advertisements do we see that during heatwave periods, we should avoid greasy food, right? That might really help to adapt to the extreme heat temperatures.

Likewise, the third example could be around fountains, water fountains. In my own experience, we in the U.S., we have a lot of water fountains which are in public parks or public parks or schools in these kind of places. But those are not the regions when there is a strong heatwave or higher temperatures where people would go. People might be commuting to work, people might be in public spaces for some of the other reasons. So how many water fountains do we see in the U.S. which are along the transit corridors or public places where people can leverage these kind of things? In Europe, I have seen when I traveled to multiple places, there are public fountains in high-traffic areas where people are taking advantage of. I think these are small steps that we should think about while we do work on engineered solutions to mitigate and adapt to heat.

MARK BRODIE: The tool that you created, do you think it would at some point, or would it be desirable to scale it up to places beyond Illinois? Like, is this the kind of thing that that might be able to be replicated or scaled to to have in the Phoenix area or in Arizona at some point?

ASHISH SHARMA: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we have a vision to scale it, but we didn’t want to start big. We wanted to start something and validate and pilot it over in Illinois, primarily because we are working here and that we have really good partnerships, and once this is — we have made it operational, we are making advancements as we speak, and our vision is to scale it nationally. And if we can get more resources, then we would like to make it global and so on, and how can we partner with other regions to share the frameworks that we have so that they can also adapt to it?

MARK BRODIE: Ashish Sharma leads the climate and sustainability program at Discovery Partners Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.