This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Heat stress is a leading cause of weather-related deaths and can be especially dangerous in cities, where phenomena like urban heat islands drive temperatures higher than in surrounding rural areas. Now, a new dataset developed by the U.S.
National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) aims to provide city governments and health officials with information that could minimize heat impacts on residents. The layout of a city, including the height and density of buildings, can affect not just the number on the thermometer but also whether it feels cooler or hotter because of factors like wind and shade. This means more information than just temperature is needed to understand the true impacts of extreme heat on residents.
Researchers at NSF NCAR, Emory University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill believed high-resolution urban meteorology datasets could help and began by focusing on Atlanta. The result is the High-resolution Urban Meteorology for Impacts Dataset for Atlanta Metropolitan Region (HUMID-Atlanta). "This is a useful tool in actually quantifying how human beings experience heat in an urban environment and how factors like wind or humidity influence the impacts," said Tzu-Shun Lin, an NSF NCAR scientist and lead author of the paper.
"HUMID-Atlanta is just the first dataset of its kind. We're already talking with other major cities and looking into the possibility of creating a version for the entire conterminous U.S." This research is published in the journal Scientific Data. To create HUMID-Atlanta, Lin and his colleagues started with an existing dataset called HUMID that was also developed at NSF NCAR.
The HUMID dataset was created using an offline simplistic urban model combined with measurements of temperature and humidity for the years 1980–2018. While it was an important research advancement, it did not capture how the atmosphere interacts with the urban environment. To improve HUMID, the research team coupled it with NSF NCAR's Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF), piloting the method in the Atlanta metropolitan area.
WRF can incorporate more details about an urban environment through the WRF-Urban extension. Adding characteristics like building height enables HUMID-Atlanta to capture details such as how wind moves around buildings and influences cooling, a factor that can change how humans are affected by heat. The resulting enhanced dataset covers the years 2010–2023 and can be used to cross-reference records, such as hospitalizations, with detailed heat data from the same period.
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