NASA HEALTH AND AIR QUALITY APPLIED SCIENCES TEAM
Connecting NASA Data and Tools with Health and Air Quality Stakeholders

Dr. Christopher Uejio

Credentials: Assistant Professor, Florida State University

Address:
Twitter: @ckuejio
cuejio@fsu.edu

For the past 16 years. I’ve researched how the physical environment influences human health and well-being. I co-authored the CDC’s Building Resilience Against Climate Effects framework. I frequently work with health departments to understand and adapt to climate change.

HAQAST Project: Evaluating Urban Heat Island Mitigation Strategies on Diurnal Heat Exposure and Health Outcomes

Christopher’s team aims to demonstrate how Earth observations can cost-effectively and efficiently monitor cooling infrastructure (CI) influence on the spatially and temporally dynamic thermal environment collectively impacted by both temperature and moisture, and to unveil the direct health benefits by linking the emergency calls with the CIs cooling using state-of-art quantitative models. The overarching goal of this project is to improve public health decision making on CI investment through refining satellite observations and portable statistic modeling through close stakeholder engagement.

Project goals/deliverables:

  1. Capture diurnal to seasonal variation of intra-urban temperature and moisture patterns.
  2. Evaluate the diurnal thermal effect of cooling infrastructures at the city scale.
  3. Characterize diurnal temperature patterns of urban surface elements by down-scaling ECOSTRESS to the sub-pixel level.
  4. Identify the controlling factors on the local thermal effect of CI.
  5. In New York City, associate areally averaged land surface temperature against heat-sensitive distress calls over 2016-2020.
  6. Develop scenarios to quantify the existing and potential future benefits of CI to reduce heat exposures and improve health.

Co-Investigators/Team Members: Leiqiu Hu (University of Alabama Huntsville), Daphne Lundi (New York City Mayor’s Office), Jennifer Camponeschi (Wisconsin Environmental Public Health Tracking Program at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services).

Publications