Did you want to know a little more about heat islands?

Well, you might for good reason.

If you are an urban resident, congratulations, you live on an island, a heat island.

Now, your experience of that will differ depending on whether your neighborhood has a lot of trees,

has very dense development,

has large parking lots, or not.

That's Edith de Guzman from our Heat Islands episode, and she's here now in our bonus episode,

to give us a more technical knowledge about something many of us are facing,

but first, how do you even

identify a heat island? So the urban heat island effect that you've heard of is measured as the

temperature difference between an urban area and a close by natural site, undeveloped site,

that serves as a reference, which sounds like an easy approach,

but it's actually quite complicated. And in Los Angeles, where we have such a built-out space,

it's very challenging to do so. Now, the EPA has reviewed a lot of research studies and data

and found that in the United States, the heat island

effect results in daytime temperatures increasing in urban areas about one to seven degrees Fahrenheit

higher than in rural places. In nighttime temperatures, the increase is about two to five degrees

Fahrenheit. And so then the question becomes, what are those alterations that cause the temperatures to be

different between that natural site reference point and the urban area?

And those fall into a few categories, with our built environment being a major one.

So our buildings, our roads, our parking lots,

all of these surfaces absorb heat during the day, and then they release it during the night.

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