On one of Bloomington’s hottest days, during the hottest U.S. summer on record, a group of Indiana University students and volunteers on bicycles gathered outside the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering.
Dana Habeeb, assistant professor of informatics at the Luddy School, showed the volunteers maps of the routes they would ride to collect street-by-street temperature data in different areas of Bloomington, using heat sensors attached to the back of their bikes.
The data they gathered will inform research conducted by Habeeb’s Healthy Cities Lab to better understand and predict how temperatures vary across communities.
This work supports the development of tools that Habeeb and her lab use in community-based projects such as Beat the Heat, funded by the Indiana Office of Rural and Community Affairs.
Habeeb, a trained architect and urban designer who uses design expertise to inform her research on environmental planning and health, created Beat the Heat to help Indiana communities better understand their heat risk vulnerability and develop strategies to build resilience to extreme heat.
For each year that Beat the Heat takes place, two Indiana cities work with Habeeb and two McKinney Climate Fellows from the IU Environmental Resilience Institute to target specific heat resilience strategies for that community.
