Lead: Stephanie Sharo
Counselors: James Shope, Benjamin Litner, Clinton Andrews, Gediminas Mainelis, Robert Laumbach

This project, led by Stephanie Sharo, aims to utilize enhanced urban heat and air quality monitoring to quantify the patterns of exposure in the Northeast Corridor to support proactive healthcare. Health warnings and alerts for high heat and poor air quality conditions often come from services or models that provide regional data that are not informed by measurements taken directly from within urban neighborhoods. As a result, city residents may experience harmful heat or air hazards earlier or more often than regional warnings may indicate, making it harder for healthcare professionals to know when to warn patients who are most at risk. To fill this gap, this group is establishing and utilizing existing small-scale urban heat and air quality monitoring networks in four urban locations, Philadelphia, PA, Camden, NJ, New Brunswick, NJ, and Elizabeth, NJ, to inform and improve data collection.

This effort is being carried out in partnership with the Community Heat Assessment and Monitoring Program (CHAMP), which aims to develop a weather station network within urban communities. By comparing local measurements with weather and climate model data, they will correct model biases so they better reflect real conditions in urban environments. This data will then be used to identify larger weather patterns that are linked to extreme heat and poor air quality in these cities and track how these patterns develop over time. The results will support more accurate and timely health warnings, helping medical and public health professionals better protect people who are vulnerable. The research team plans to pilot this system to issue alerts by utilizing the existing Your Health Kiosk digital text platform, directed by Dr. Sabiha Hussian, that allows healthcare professionals to remotely communicate with patients. Relevant materials will also be provided to physicians in the Cooper University Hospital and the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Systems.