Feeling the Heat

In 2024, researchers from the Boston University School of Public Health, in partnership with A Better City, the Boston Foundation and the City of Boston, ran a pilot project to explore how different neighborhoods around the City of Boston experienced heat relative to the city's "official" weather station at Logan Airport. The research team installed fifteen heat sensors in neighborhoods throughout the city that typically experienced high levels of heat, and compared heat readings there to temperatures at Logan on days where the city had declared either a "heat advisory" (three days of over 90º temperatures expected), or a "heat emergency" (two days over 95º with overnight lows above 75º).

Building upon existing research, the goal was to better understand whether neighborhood-specific temperature sensor data might be incorporated into more targeted heat emergency declarations and protocols for Boston, as well as inform the city, local institutions, and community-based partners on how to distribute available resources to heat-vulnerable residents and workers. The report shares the results of the pilot measurements, along with suggestions for next steps and future work.