Skip to content
Primary Menu
Education, Presentation, Publication
Funding & Recognition

HAPPIEST- Modeling and Understanding Heat Stress in Northern Utah

Summer 2026

Project Background

The built environment has anthropogenic materials that cause temperatures to be higher than the surrounding rural areas, results in an urban heat island (UHI). This UHI can be as large as 4-6 C. During summer, an UHI can exacerbate heat stress and health complications in urban areas. Quantifying the UHI intensity requires a spatial dataset of temperature measurements from meteorological monitors, satellites, or models. This project will focus on writing computer code to download large datasets online in an automated manner. Then these datasets will be used to calculate UHI intensity and the spatiotemporal distribution of ambient temperature, land surface temperature, and winds to quantify heat stress. The spatial maps of heat stress can be used to investigate which populations in urban areas experience the highest heat related impacts.
Research Objective: Understand the spatiotemporal variability and atmospheric processes impacting heat and heat stress in Northern Utah.
Please note that HAPPIEST projects have additional eligibility requirements. All applicants MUST be from the University of Utah.

Student Role

Students will learn where to find open access meteorology data and how to write computer codes to access the data, perform data analysis, and make visualizations. Additionally, this research project will give students experience merging multiple large, open access data sets to answer a cutting-edge research question related to heat health concerns in Utah.

Student Learning Outcomes and Benefits

  1. Computational skills for big data; students will develop numerical codes to import and read large datasets, extract data from the larger datasets, make graphs, and perform statistical evaluation of numerical models.
  2. Open access geosciences data; students will be able to identify data sources, learn to access the data, and use measurements to evaluate numerical models.

 

Apply Here

Heather Holmes

Heather Holmes

Associate Professor
Engineering
Chemical Engineering

I will (1) meet with the student weekly to discuss research progress, (2) work with the student to prepare a research poster with the results from this project at the end of the 10 week program (i.e., teach them about communicating scientific results), (3) incorporate them in research group meetings where they will give practice presentations based on their research progress., and (4) help them prepare materials for future graduate school or job applications.

 

To learn more about HAPPIEST, please visit here!