The center for the center for collaborative heat monitoring intends to address two closely connected problems: (1) the continued challenges associated with understanding and fulfilling urgent data…

The center for the center for collaborative heat monitoring intends to address two closely connected problems: (1) the continued challenges associated with understanding and fulfilling urgent data needs about inequitable exposure to heat in communities across the united states, and (2) the continued DE-facto exclusion of heat-imperiled communities from large-scale participatory science campaigns. Our proposed approach is to gain a more nuanced and detailed understanding of data needs, desires, and capacities for engagement from inequitably heat-burdened and imperiled communities, and then tailor community science campaigns with these communities through a novel science-to-civics approach. This approach will localize community concerns and priorities about heat through prolonged engagement, investment, and flexibility in monitoring capability to respond to varied data and science needs. Our proposed center will center equity in our approach ensuring that the national presence of our center is accessible, that application and selection processes are not burdensome or technically challenging for smaller communities, and that our process for selection is built around JUSTICE40 ensuring that each year, we are working with systematically excluded communities to broaden the impact and benefits of participatory science, heat data and information, and modeling to more communities not-yet served by these programs. Our proposal is built around our ability to provide communities with replicable models for mobile, stationary, wearable, and long-term heat monitoring by citizens in each community, a long-term engagement approach that is responsive to the communitys needs and desires, and our capacity for situational modeling to provide communities not only snapshot data about their communities, but model what may occur in the future under climate change, under development scenarios, or after interventions.