Shortly after the sun rises in Reno, the city’s summer temperatures are already withering. The Biggest Little City constantly hovers in the 90s and often dips its toes into the 100s.
The Biggest Little City constantly hovers in the 90s and often dips its toes into the 100s. Plants droop. Pedestrians seek out the shady side of the street — or wait until the sun goes back down.In some communities, mature trees shade sidewalks. Well-insulated houses shelter their residents from temperature swings.
The goal of the project is not just to measure temperatures — the National Weather Service tracks those at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas and the Reno-Tahoe International Airport — but to also measure the spectrum of temperatures across urban areas to understand what pockets hold the most heat. Known as heat islands, these areas are a growing problem as the climate warms.
Observations and data gathered through the heat mapping projects “help us gain traction and visibility and will call policy makers and practitioners’ attention to start worrying about it,” said John Mejia, atmospheric modeler at the Desert Research Institute . When those in power start worrying about extreme heat, he said, it will “eventually help bring the resources for us to address it head on.”
In Reno, the mapping prioritized schools, community centers, sporting facilities and along transportation corridors — places where people tend to gather outside. They were driving through Baker, California, where the temperature reached 124 degrees. Choinard stepped out of her car briefly and even her eyeballs felt hot.During the heatwave, temperatures didn’t cool down too much at night. Higher nighttime temperatures are partially caused by impermeable surfaces such as asphalt capturing heat during the day, which then release the heat after the sun goes down.
The night before, local thunderstorms brought in heavy cloud cover that lingered into the day. The amount of direct solar radiation an area receives influences the heat island effect, and the cloud cover may have lowered the range of temperatures the area would have otherwise seen. But scientists still believe the data collected that day accurately depicted which communities were hotter than others.
The differences across Las Vegas are “extraordinarily stark,” Choinard said. “There are so many inequalities at the heart of this conversation.”Rising Nevada temperatures have led to groups such as the nonprofit Climate Central to rank Reno and Las Vegas among the fastest warming cities in the nation.
“We are attributing all these deaths to heat, and it feels like there should be something we can do about it, and the first thing to do is enhance the information we have,” Mejia said, citing the need for heat mapping projects such as the one in Reno.According to the World Health Organization, nearly a half million people died each year between 2000 and 2019 from heat.
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