She has what’s basically a very fancy thermometer that she clips onto her bag that records the temperature as she goes, noting when and where it’s hotter or cooler as she moves around her neighborhood.
What she finds as she walks around would probably be familiar to many Atlantans in the summer: smaller streets with trees shading the sidewalk feel cooler than bigger streets with lots of lanes, surrounded by parking lots.
Approaching a busy 14th Street intersection, Kiernicki notes the lack of trees.
“There’s so many roads converging and all these gas stations,” she says. “And so just a lot of concrete right now.”
Kiernicki graduated from Tech this past year. Over the summer, she’s one of dozens of people who volunteered to collect data for UrbanHeatATL, a project lead by professors at Georgia Tech and Spelman College to map how hot it is in parts of Atlanta, street by street.
The goal is to get a more detailed understanding of which neighborhoods in Atlanta are the hottest, and to highlight solutions for the most vulnerable communities.
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