Jan Wesner Childs
From above, it looks like a normal city block, speckled with buildings and a few trees.
Then you see the thermal drone images - red and orange sections of heat, illustrating how choices in building materials and landscaping are making our communities hotter.
"The biggest culprit far and away that I see are rooftops," Keenan Gibbons, a landscape architect working with drones to map urban heat islands, told weather.com in an interview Thursday.
Specifically noted, Gibbons said, are black asphalt roofs that absorb heat.
"If it's 80 degrees outside, I've seen it be over 160 degrees on some of these rooftops," he said.
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Gibbons and fellow landscape architect Salvador Lindquist are measuring urban heat islands in cities like Omaha, Nebraska. The urban heat island effect is what makes cities feel hotter than rural areas, and drives temperatures higher in major metropolitan areas.
Satellite data is often used to measure them, but drones are becoming an increasingly popular scientific tool.
“That resolution is much greater with the way we're approaching it and we're able to do it whenever we want to because it's so portable and 'right now,' versus waiting for the satellite at the right time to come through," Gibbons said.
It also allows them to hone in on specific targets.
“What we're finding is that heat is a really localized thing," Lindquist said.
An exposed sidewalk, for example, can be 20 to 30 degrees warmer than a surface under a tree just a few feet away.
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And It isn't just temperatures or surfaces or roofs.
"A big topic right now are playgrounds and there's this thing called burn time, and different materials have different levels of burn time," Lindquist said. "We have to think about how we come into direct contact and we also have to think about the way we design for thermal comfort on a little bit more of a micro level."
Lindquist and Gibbons hope to make their data available to both government leaders and regular citizens, with the idea being that everyone needs to rethink the way buildings are constructed and yards are landscaped.
They say individuals can take action right now, like choosing more native plants and trees for landscaping and selecting lighter colored roofing materials.
(MORE: Why Aren't All Beach Houses Built On Stilts?)
And in the longer term, communities have to plan for an increasingly warmer world. June through August was the hottest three-month period ever recorded on Earth, heat waves are getting hotter and happening more often and the 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 2010.
“So if we see that trend globally, the material choices we've made in our cities for the past half century or more are only going to intensify that trend and make it more dangerous and hard to survive," Gibbons said.
"But we do have the ability now to look at it and to try to mitigate it, reduce it and make better choices going forward, and then retro fitting the ones we might have gotten wrong."
Brandon Burton contributed to this report.
Weather.com reporter Jan Childs covers breaking news and features related to weather, space, climate change, the environment and everything in between.
The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.
The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.
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