Ladd Keith, Ph.D.

Tag: Extreme heat

  • Extreme Heat Webinar with the Urban Land Institute and Design Workshop

    Extreme Heat and Real Estate

    We were joined by Katharine Burgess, Vice President of Urban Resilience and Elizabeth Foster, Manager of Urban Resilience at the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and Alex Ramirez, Office Director and Associate at Design Workshop for our latest Extreme Heat Network webinar. Our presenters discussed how private and public sector real estate leaders are mitigating and adapting to extreme heat. ULI shared key takeaways from a 2019 report on this topic, and Design Workshop presented a case study of their award-winning Bagby Street reconstruction project in Houston, Texas where mitigating temperatures was a guiding consideration.

    Several Urban Land Institute resources mentioned throughout the presentation:

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  • Extreme Heat Network Webinar with Pete Aniello

    Rapid Production of Urban Heat Island Maps for the U.S.

    Pete Aniello joined our Extreme Heat Network webinar series to present The Trust for Public Land‘s new urban heat island dataset. The publicly accessible dataset is analysis-ready and contains the relative heat severity for every pixel for 14,000 cities, towns, and census-designated places in the United States. The 30-meter resolution raster was derived from Landsat 8 imagery band 10 (ground-level thermal sensor) from the summers of 2018 and 2019.

    Pete Aniello, Senior Manager of Science and Analytics at The Trust for Public Land (TPL), has over 30 years of experience in the geospatial field and is TPL’s technical lead for geospatial analysis. Prior to TPL, Pete worked at Sandia National Laboratories as a senior scientist; Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) as a technical manager; Digital Globe as a photogrammetrist; Raytheon as a program manager of the ASTER Digital Elevation Model (DEM) program; and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) as a geospatial analyst. Pete graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Geology from the University of Kansas, and a Master of Engineering in Geographic Information Systems from the University of Colorado – Denver. He is an American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) Certified Photogrammetrist (CP), and an Esri ArcGIS Certified Desktop Professional. He has been a resident of the southwest for 20 years and currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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  • America Adapts Podcast Episode on Extreme Heat

    I’m very excited to share that I was a guest on the America Adapts podcast for its first episode focused on extreme heat! America Adapts is a podcast hosted by my colleague and friend, Doug Parsons, with over a hundred episodes exploring climate change, its impacts, and our responses with scientists, activists, policymakers, and climate communicators.

    In the extreme heat episode, we discuss the contributors to extreme heat including climate change and the urban heat island effect; the impacts of extreme heat on public health, the economy, urban ecology and more; some strategies that cities are using to increase their resilience to increasing extreme heat risk; and more broadly how urban planning is addressing climate change as a discipline. We only had time to scratch the surface of all that is going on in research and practice for extreme heat, but my hope is that the episode serves as a good introduction for those interested in the topic.

    Listen here: Fundamentals of Extreme Heat and Climate Change with Dr. Ladd Keith of University of Arizona

    Doug and I recording the podcast episode in my office on campus.

    Extreme Heat Resources

    Below are several of the resources I mentioned throughout the podcast episode.

    Extreme Heat Reports

    Initiatives and Networks

    U.S. Climate Change Information

  • Planning for Extreme Heat Survey

    My colleague Sara Meerow, PhD, Assistant Professor at Arizona State University, and I are studying how urban planners address extreme heat. Our goal is to survey planning professionals from a wide range of U.S. communities to better understand how extreme heat risk perceptions, current planning activities, and barriers to action vary across the country. This information will be useful for practitioners and researchers in the effort to create more extreme heat resilient communities.

    Photograph by Gregor Orbino

    This survey should only take about 10 minutes and participants will be eligible to win one of two $50 Amazon gift cards upon completing it. Please take it, share it with your urban planning colleagues, and let me know if there is a network you are a part of that we can share the survey with!

    Update: Survey closed.

  • Extreme Heat Network Webinar with Jeremy Hoffman, PhD

    Community-based participatory research campaigns to build climate resilience

    Jeremy Hoffman, PhD joined our Extreme Heat Network webinar series to discuss how community-based participatory research campaigns, known as “citizen science”, can aid in the creation of urban heat island maps and increase extreme heat resilience. He will discuss the impacts of campaigns in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, MD, Washington, D.C., and Boston, MA as case studies.

    Jeremy Hoffman, PhD is the Chief Scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia. Dr. Hoffman graduated summa cum laude and with Distinction in Geology from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, then earned his Ph.D. in Geology with a focus in Paleoclimatology at Oregon State University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and OMSI Science Communication Fellow. After 2.5 years at the Science Museum of Virginia as their Climate & Earth Science Specialist, producing climate science educational content, he has now assumed the role of Chief Scientist.

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