Hotlanta lives up to its most hated nickname — in some places more than others.
UrbanHeatATL has been documenting the phenomenon of urban heat islands — pockets of intensified heat compared to surrounding rural or suburban areas — throughout the City of Atlanta and identifying the places where they’re more intense than others.
On July 17, the organization held an Adopt a Sensor Training; it followed this with an Urban Heat Rendezvous on July 26 where volunteers, called community scientists, went to “point of interest” locations and collected data in treks ranging. These community scientists were able to take measurements on a number of modes of moving about the city, including walking, running, biking or skating for 15 to 30 minute intervals, depending on the heat intensity.
The UrbanHeatATL initiative formally began in 2021 under the leadership of Dr. Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, co-founder of the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, an environmental justice and advocacy initiative. Since June, the organization has been collecting data for its summer sampling season.
Their latest findings, found in a recently released Urban Heat Workshop Publication Spring 2025 report titled Mapping Extreme Heat, suggest that areas with less tree canopy and green space tended to be hotter. Oftentimes, these are overlapped with areas that have higher annual ER visits for asthma, a higher percentage of low-income residents, and a higher percentage of people of color, and UrbanHeatATL called for investment in green spaces in these areas. In effect, heat islands were found to disproportionately affect “working-class and low-income communities,” according to UrbanHeatATL.
Local organization Trees Atlanta, along with other researchers studying the phenomenon, has supported the idea that trees are an environmentally-friendly solution to mitigating the effects of urban heat islands by shading the area beneath their canopies and reducing energy demand from air conditioning.
Other recommendations from that publication call for local emergency response teams and resiliency hub infrastructure, cooling centers, preservation and expansion of Atlanta’s iconic tree canopy and community heat response planning groups.
This data is important, too, for children and vulnerable populations to know where and when the warmest parts and times of their neighborhoods will be throughout the day, or where to go if the heat becomes unbearable.
None of the recommendations would have the data backing it; however, if it weren’t for the community scientists. Quanda Spencer, UrbanHeatATL project manager with West Atlanta Watershed Alliance (WAWA), said becoming a community scientist who collects data is a fun, non-time-intensive, unique way to volunteer. So far, they’ve been able to rely in large part on students to be their community scientists.
“The data that was collected in 2021 and 2022 was primarily hyperfocused around where the students and volunteers collected the data in that timeframe, and a lot of those data points were from Georgia Tech’s area or in Midtown Atlanta,” adding a large amount of data also came from Spelman College area and random pockets in North Atlanta and DeKalb.
For this data collection season and in the future, the team is looking to get more data from less-explored parts of Atlanta.
“We want to know how heat is affecting the other parts of Atlanta that don’t really get seen,” Spencer said. “How is heat really affecting Southwest Atlanta, how is heat affecting the Westside of Atlanta, how is heat affecting Downtown Atlanta, especially as we are still in the fight of the tree protection ordinance that is still being talked about amongst the city council?”
The PocketLab weather sensors themselves capture ambient air temperatures every second, giving the UrbanHeatATL research team consistent data throughout routes that residents take throughout the city.
The ambient air temperature — also known as “dry bulb temperature” — measures the temperature of the immediate surrounding environment, and therefore can be more accurate for a specific corridor than the temperature seen on our phone weather apps that get their readings from the National Weather Surface sensors at specific stations that paint a broader overview of an area.
UrbanHeatATL ultimately hopes to publish a white paper with its collected data.
For neighborhoods that have been underinvested in for years, part of the path to becoming more walkable lies in making those walks convenient and comfortable. That can’t be done without taking into account how heat will affect those walks.
The UrbanHeatATL joins other grassroots projects around the nation — even others based in Atlanta, too — experiencing and chronicling local intense heat, in a world that is continually experiencing the hottest years on record. UrbanHeatATL said that interest in being a community scientist has been growing since last year. The next Urban Heat Rendezvous will take place Aug. 9; anyone interested in volunteering to be a community scientist can sign up here to adopt a sensor.
