CAREER: Human Thermal Exposure in Cities - Novel Sensing and Modeling to Build Heat-Resilience

人类在极端高温下的热暴露是一个日益严重的健康问题，也是世界范围内一个紧迫的社会问题，气候变率、更频繁和更强烈的热浪、持续的城市化以及经济差距扩大和人口老龄化加剧的社会人口变化将加剧这一问题。高温对人们的工作表现、健康和福祉产生了广泛的不利影响，对未来城市的可持续性和宜居性构成了重大挑战。城市基础设施（如街道、建筑物、树木）和微观到全球尺度气候之间复杂的相互作用驱动着生物气候或人类对热量的感受。这项教师早期职业发展（Career）资助的目标是促进对城市建筑环境如何影响热量和人类热暴露的理解。这个变革性项目弥合了局部实地工作与大规模、可推广模型之间的差距，将超越传统热量研究的限制，并从根本上通过使用基于辐射的指标和指数来重新定义城市地区的热量评估方式。与城市建立的新的学术-实践伙伴关系将产生共同开发的、以解决方案为导向的研究，这些研究将转化为基础设施管理和以人为本的热危害缓解的可操作最佳实践。这项工作与美国国家科学基金会促进公众健康和福祉的使命一致。它有可能通过为公共政策提供信息，使社区更加热舒适和适宜步行，提高热意识，建立适应能力和社区热恢复能力，并有可能减少与热有关的疾病和死亡的发生率，从而带来更广泛的社会变革。该项目的研究目标是：1)通过广泛的实地工作活动，在城市形态和材料的全参数空间中，创造关于建筑环境中复杂生物气候动力学的基础知识；2)利用创新的大数据和人工智能方法，在前所未有的时空尺度上评估城市中人类的热暴露和舒适度；3)将城市“热点”与高热风险人群联系起来，进行脆弱性分析；4)在当前和未来气候条件下，评估单一和组合的热危害缓解策略（如凉爽路面和增加树冠覆盖）的生物气候效率。该项目将使用一种新型的移动传感平台（MaRTy）来表征美国两个城市（亚利桑那州凤凰城和加利福尼亚州洛杉矶）的热景观，了解城市基础设施与热量之间的非线性关系，并建立第一个综合地理数据库，涵盖城市形态（配置和组成）、材料和植被的全参数空间，在炎热天气下进行人类热暴露观测。一个开源的、基于辐射的人体热暴露模型（OpenMRT）将利用街景图像和深度学习，从以人为中心的角度量化所经历的热量。OpenMRT将用于评估凤凰城和洛杉矶的各种城市基础设施改造对城市范围内人类热暴露和脆弱性的影响，以适应当前和未来的气候条件和城市形态情景。该项目的教育目标是1)通过招募女性进入工程领域拓宽STEM管道，2)促进跨学科发展，3)通过实施纵向和横向整合的教育计划建立学者社区。在非正式学习环境中以及通过社会和传统媒体传播研究成果，将提高公众对热、健康和城市制冷基础设施作用的认识。该项目还支持通过融合教育交流关于城市基础设施热影响的新知识，这种教育使来自不同学科的从业者和决策者参与进来，共同制定缓解热影响的解决方案，这些解决方案可转化为基于观测数据和建模的城市基础设施管理的有效政策，以增强城市抵御热影响的能力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Human thermal exposure to extreme heat is a growing health concern and pressing societal problem worldwide that will be exacerbated by climate variability, more frequent and intense heat waves, continued urbanization, and socio-demographic changes towards bigger economic disparities and a growing elderly population. Hazardous heat has wide-ranging adverse effects on people’s performance, health, and well-being, posing a major challenge to the sustainability and livability of cities in the future. The bioclimate or how humans experience heat is driven by complex interactions between urban infrastructure (e.g., streets, buildings, trees) and micro- to global scale climates. The goal of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant is to advance understanding of how the built environment impacts heat and human thermal exposure in cities. Bridging the gap between localized field-based work and large-scale, generalizable models, this transformative project will expand beyond the limits of conventional heat research and fundamentally reframe how heat is assessed in urban areas by using radiation-based metrics and indices. New academic-practitioner partnerships with cities will yield co-developed, solutions-oriented research that translates into actionable best practices for infrastructure management and human-centric heat hazard mitigation. This work aligns with NSF's mission to advance public health and well-being. It has the potential to result in broader societal change by informing public policy to make communities more thermally comfortable and walkable, increase heat awareness, build adaptive capacity and community resilience to heat, and potentially reduce the incidence of heat-related illness and death.The research objectives of this project are to 1) create fundamental knowledge on the complex bioclimatic dynamics in the built environment across the full parameter space of urban forms and materials through extensive field work campaigns; 2) assess human thermal exposure and comfort in cities at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales using an innovative big data and artificial intelligence approach; 3) perform a vulnerability analysis by linking urban “hot spots” to populations at risk to high heat; and 4) evaluate the bioclimatic efficiency of single and combined heat hazard mitigation strategies such as cool pavements and increased tree canopy cover for current and future climate conditions. The project will use a novel mobile sensing platform (MaRTy) to characterize heatscapes in two US cities (Phoenix, AZ and Los Angeles, CA), understand the non-linear relationship between urban infrastructure and heat, and build the first comprehensive geodatabase of human thermal exposure observations during hot weather across the full parameter space of urban form (configuration and composition), materials, and vegetation. An open-source, radiation-based human thermal exposure model (OpenMRT) will be developed using Street View images and deep learning to quantify experienced heat from a human-centric perspective. OpenMRT will be employed to assess the impact of various urban infrastructure modifications on city-wide human thermal exposure and vulnerability in Phoenix and Los Angeles for current and future climate conditions and urban form scenarios. The education objectives of this project are to 1) broaden the STEM pipeline by recruiting women into engineering, 2) foster interdisciplinarity, and 3) build a community of scholars by implementing a vertically and horizontally integrated education plan. Dissemination of research findings in informal learning settings and through social and traditional media will enhance public literacy around heat, health, and the role of urban infrastructure for cooling. The project also supports the exchange of new knowledge on the thermal impacts of urban infrastructure through convergent education, which engages practitioners and decision-makers from various disciplines to co-create heat mitigation solutions that can be translated into effective policies for urban infrastructure management that are grounded in observational data and modeling to increase urban resilience to heat.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.