Residential Segregation and Urban Heat Stress Disparities in the United States

Urban Versus Lake Impacts on Heat Stress and Its Disparities in a Shoreline City

“…Overall, for daytime, when heat stress would be maximum, our results show qualitatively consistent results regardless of model setup, physics schemes, and spatial resolutions, with similar lake‐to‐land gradients and associations with median income (Figures 1b, 4, 7, 8, 9; Figures S9 and S10 in Supporting Information ). Moreover, air temperature and heat stress show lower spatial variability than skin temperature, which makes conceptual sense and is in line with previous observational and modeling estimates at various scales (Chakraborty, Newman, et al., 2023; Chakraborty et al., 2022; Ho et al., 2016; Venter et al., 2021). However, we did find that the models configurations can give conflicting results for disparities in minimum average measures of heat exposure (Figure 7; Figure S10 in Supporting Information ), which requires better representation of nighttime urban processes in the model.…”

“…The maximum summer averages of all variables generally increase with Hardship index, with the greatest sensitivity for skin temperature and the least for wet‐bulb temperature (Figure S7 in Supporting Information ). These results indicate the importance of examining disparities in physiologically relevant estimates of heat stress instead of satellite‐derived skin temperature to accurately quantify urban environmental inequities, which has also been noted in a nationwide study using a much simpler urban modeling framework (Chakraborty, Newman, et al., 2023). Although our study does show that using skin temperature, as done frequently in previous studies, may exaggerate the magnitude of disparities in heat exposure, it is important to stress that public health consequences of weather extremes depend on both exposure and vulnerability (Hsu et al., 2021).…”

“…On the other hand, breezes originating from water bodies can bring in more moisture during the day (S. T. K. Miller et al., 2003). Although previous urban modeling studies have considered physiologically relevant heat stress metric (Chakraborty, Newman, et al., 2023; K. Huang et al., 2021; Oleson et al., 2015; Zhao, 2021), they are generally not run with configurations or resolutions capable of resolving coastal gradients. Thus, there is a need to understand how the interaction between urbanization and adjacent water bodies impact air temperature, relative humidity, and wind, and thus heat stress, in shoreline cities.…”

“…Across a global subset of cities (Chakraborty et al., 2019), and particularly in the US (Hsu et al., 2021), this variability leads to disproportionately higher heat exposure for poorer and other vulnerable communities. Some of these disparities relate to population dynamics within cities, frequently associated with historical discriminatory practices (Hoffman et al., 2020) as well as present inequities (Chakraborty, Newman, et al., 2023; Juday, 2015). Most multi‐city studies that have examined disparities in heat exposure have done so using satellite‐derived skin temperature (Benz & Burney, 2021; Chakraborty et al., 2019; Hoffman et al., 2020; Hsu et al., 2021).…”

Projecting Future Heat Stress Disparities to 2100 in the Contiguous United States

“…Our results con rm that global mean air temperature is nonlinearly related to heat stress, meaning that the same future warming experienced could trigger larger increases in societal and health impacts than documented using only surface temperature 14 . Our results are also consistent with Chakraborty et al 34 , who found differences in the magnitude of disparities in heat exposure and stress when using different metrics, although consistent disparities were determined for populations of color and lower income. The selection of heat indicators should be guided by a study's speci c objectives.…”