This summer, the Asheville-based nonprofit GreenWorks will lead an effort to map the hottest neighborhoods in the city and parts of Buncombe County.
The metro area is one of 18 across the country selected to participate in an ongoing project to examine extreme heat in urban areas, which has been linked to a menu of health and other problems. The study will identify hotspots known as urban heat islands - think lots of concrete and few trees.
An area that is a hotspot "absorbs a lot of the heat, especially during the summer when the days are long and the sun is pretty powerful. So they take up all that heat during the day and radiate it out back out overnight," GreenWorks Executive Director Dawn Chavez said. "And so these areas that are highly developed become islands of heat within the landscape. So the surrounding area might be several degrees cooler than than the cities are.”
The study will be conducted this summer by volunteers who will drive around the city and county very slowly with heat sensors attached to their cars, Chavez said.
“We're going to be mapping up to 100 square miles of the greater Asheville area, and we'll need probably about 60 to 100 volunteers," she said. "This group of volunteers will be deployed throughout the city on that day, and they will be given about a five square mile area to cover. They have to do that three times during that study day."
The data will be collected, analyzed, and translated into maps.
“With that information we can look at where are the areas that most need cooling and shade, and so we can target those areas to plant trees," she said. "And hopefully those trees will provide not only shade, but the cooling effects and all the other benefits that trees bring.”
Results of previous research suggest neighborhoods in the city and county do not share the extreme heat burden equally. Chavez said she hopes this study will help bring equity to the effort to help the mountain metro area become more climate resilient.
“We all are experiencing the impacts of climate change at the local level, but we're not all experiencing it in the same way. So when we have extreme heat or other impacts related to lack of trees such as flooding or landslides... they're affecting communities that can't just up and move to a place where those things don't happen."
Lower income neighborhoods are disproportionately affected, she said.
"It's often the folks who are least responsible for climate change that are being impacted the most," she said.
The study day will likely be in mid-July. GreenWorks is consulting with the National Weather Service to predict the hottest day in Asheville to conduct the study.
The project, is a collaborative program coordinated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Program Office, the interagency National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS), and CAPA Strategies, LLC.
GreenWorks has partnered with the National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center(NEMAC), an applied research center at the University of North Carolina Asheville, and the City of Asheville Sustainability Department to help choose the areas to be mapped and create tools and maps interpreting and activating the project data.
