The City of Fort Wayne recruited volunteers to drive around the city earlier this week to record temperatures and create a “heat map” of the city, which will give them a better understanding of where heat dissipates and where it lingers.
Ten pairs of volunteers – each made up of a driver and a navigator – followed routes around the city, collecting heat and air data as they went. Drivers attached two sensors to their cars; One to collect the temperature and one to measure the air quality.
Bernadette Fellows is the community engagement planner for the department of neighborhoods. She said it’s important to measure the particulates in the air, as well as the temperature.
“‘Cause that also affects, you know, how you experience heat," Fellows said. "If there’s a lot of smog or pollution it can actually make the Urban Heat Island worse.”
An Urban Heat Island is a metropolitan area that’s much warmer than the rural areas surrounding it.
Fort Wayne was chosen as one of 14 U.S. communities and two international cities to participate in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Urban Heat Island Mapping campaign. The campaign aims to help us understand how heat affects our communities on the micro level.
The pairs of volunteers drove the same route three times on Monday; in the morning, the afternoon and the evening. It’s important that all the volunteers begin their routes at the same time and end at the same time, so the data is covering the whole city at exactly the same time.
Fellows said they do the routes three times throughout the day to see how the temperatures rise in the morning and fall in the evening.
“Urban Heat Island is really where temperatures rise and they don’t really fall at night," she said. "And that’s where it can become very dangerous for people especially in urban areas.”
Betsy Kachmar volunteered as a driver, and made a point of bringing along her electric car to reduce her own carbon emissions as she traveled around the northern portion of the city.
Kachmar is a constant volunteer, she said, and she appreciates the city for being proactive in applying to be one of the mapped cities.
“I always encourage that," Kachmar said. "Some of the places that I volunteer with, one of our primary goals is usually to get government to do better.”
Fellows said they were able to cover one hundred square miles out of Fort Wayne’s 112 square miles, focusing on areas around schools, parks and large residential areas to see how heat is affecting people in the day-to-day.
Once the data has been collected, the city can use it to identify any heat islands and work with cities that have dealt with similar issues and figure out the best way to tackle it.
Results are expected to be released this winter.
