Unequal exposure to heatwaves in Los Angeles: Impact of uneven green spaces
Abstract
Cities worldwide are experiencing record-breaking summer temperatures. Urban environments exacerbate extreme heat, resulting in not only the urban heat island but also intracity variations in heat exposure. Understanding these disparities is crucial to support equitable climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. We found persistent negative correlations between daytime land surface temperature (LST) and median household income across the Los Angeles metropolitan area based on Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station observations from 2018 to 2021. Lower evapotranspiration resulting from the unequal distribution of vegetation cover is a major factor leading to higher LST in low-income neighborhoods. Disparities worsen with higher regional mean surface temperature, with a $10,000 decrease in income leading to ~0.2°C LST increase at 20°C and up to ~0.7°C at 45°C. With more frequent and intense heat waves projected in the future, equitable mitigation measures, such as increasing surface albedo and tree cover in low-income neighborhoods, are necessary to address these disparities.
Additional Information
© 2023 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). This study is supported by NASA ECOSTRESS Science Team Project (grant no. 80NSSC20K0078). L.H. thanks the Caltech Resnick Sustainability Institute for supporting her Research Fellowship. Y.Y. designed the research. L.H. and Y.Y. collected data and performed analysis. P.O.W. and C.F. contributed to the interpretation of the results. All authors contributed to the writing and editing of the manuscript. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. The ECOSTRESS data supporting this paper are available in the Caltech Data Repository; https://data.caltech.edu/records/esx93-qx576 (https://doi.org/10.22002/esx93-qx576). The authors declare that they have no competing interests.Attached Files
Published - sciadv.ade8501.pdf
Supplemental Material - sciadv.ade8501_sm.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC10146884
- Eprint ID
- 121699
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20230602-251907000.50
- NASA
- 80NSSC20K0078
- Resnick Sustainability Institute
- Created
-
2023-06-05Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2023-06-05Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, Resnick Sustainability Institute