In the middle of a Tucson summer, the stretch of Oracle Road between Prince and River roads might just be the worst place to hang out all day. There is little shade to hide from the unforgiving sun. And the urban environment, with all its cars and asphalt, soaks up the sunlight and traps the heat for hours.

But that's precisely where Alekzander Ryan and Samantha Provenzano spent much of last summer – as well as nearly 200 other spots around Tucson – sitting in a pair of lawn chairs. They were careful to find a slice of shade and to bring plenty of water. And for about five hours a day, four days a week, for about two months, they counted cars.

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Ryan, a master's candidate studying urban planning, and Provenzano, a senior studying chemical engineering, were among a cohort of students from Arizona's three state universities who helped conduct fieldwork this summer for a U.S. Department of Energy-funded program to better understand extreme heat's effects on communities.

The program, called the Southwest Urban Integrated Field Laboratory, or SW-IFL, launched in 2022 and is a collaboration between teams at the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University, as well as the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. One of the SW-IFL's goals is to help develop heat-resilient solutions in Arizona's major metro areas.

As members of the project's HeatMappers team, Ryan and Provenzano are a crucial piece of the fieldwork observations. Using an app called Hestia Traffic developed at NAU, the pair logged every type of car that passed by their side of Oracle Road in 10-minute spans to estimate the carbon emissions on that specific stretch of Oracle.

"It's about understanding how these vehicles emit CO2 emissions and greenhouse gases, and we can later use that to better map and understand how heat is impacting Tucson," said Ryan, a student in the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, or CAPLA.

The Department of Energy awarded $25 million to ASU to lead the SW-IFL, with $3.5 million of that grant going to the U of A for its share of the project, which has involved translating the findings into outlines of heat-mitigation plans that local governments can tailor to meet their needs. 

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Ladd Keith, associate professor and University Distinguished Scholar in CAPLA, leads the U of A's involvement, which includes researchers and students from across campus.

"One of the focus areas of the Southwest IFL is extreme heat, because it's the nation's number one weather-related killer, and particularly here in Arizona, it impacts a large proportion of our population. So, understanding, as our urban corridor continues to grow, how we can mitigate and manage that impact from extreme heat is really critical," said Keith, who also directs the Heat Resilience Initiative in the Arizona Institute for Resilience and is an associate research professor in the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy. 

Heat-related deaths are a serious threat, especially in Arizona, where, according to the state health department, 977 people died of heat-related causes in 2024, which was the hottest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But there are signs, Keith said, that Arizona governments are getting better at managing increasingly extreme heat: Both Maricopa and Pima counties' heat-related death counts were down from 2023. Maricopa County reported 608 deaths in 2024, down from 645 in 2023; Pima County reported 147 deaths in 2024, down from 173 in 2023.

'Heat touches everything'

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The fieldwork by Ryan and Provenzano is part of a host of strategies the SW-IFL used to gather finely detailed data about the effects of heat in various neighborhoods. Around the same time last summer, another group of students, Paul George-Blazevich, Sofia Dracopoulos and Artemis Torre, crisscrossed sections of the U of A campus dragging a wagon-like tool called a MaRTy Cart, outfitted with weather instruments.

As one student wheeled the cart into place another logged data on a laptop. The group used the MaRTy Cart to collect data in one-hour increments every day for a couple weeks this summer, capturing info about morning, afternoon and early evening heat. 

The cart, developed by researchers at ASU, collected snapshots of the temperature, wind speed and other heat-related datapoints for various times and locations around the main campus, with a focus on gathering areas such as patios and bus stops and areas with high pedestrian traffic. They also used the cart in areas around Tucson.

"When you look up weather, say, on your phone, you're seeing weather data from the airport," said Torre, a junior studying regional development. "That could be completely different than what it actually is in the city."

One of their noontime readings of the surface of a bench came in at 168 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Kristina Currans, an associate professor in CAPLA who studies transportation, oversaw the students' fieldwork throughout the summer.

"The students all summer have been incredible collecting data in the heat, because that's a really hard job to be out there trying to measure heat," Currans said. "It's one that I think most people would avoid."

Most of the students who helped collect SW-IFL data, she said, came from programs across the university – which was by design.

"It's not surprising how many colleges have students who are interested in heat, because heat touches everything," Currans said. Representing such a diverse array of disciplines, she added, is "a useful opportunity to communicate our work and what we do to a variety of different backgrounds and people who are studying different topics. And then it also enables them to take what they've learned back into their college, into their discipline, and carry it with them throughout the rest of the program."

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Mark Kear, an associate professor in the School of Geography, Development and Environment, in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, has studied how extreme heat impacts people living in manufactured homes, which often struggle to regulate against outdoor temperatures. Last summer, Kear's team conducted hour-long surveys with residents living in manufactured homes to ask them about how extreme heat affected their day-to-day routines and what strategies they used to combat the heat. 

The team knocked on hundreds of doors, ultimately surveying 40 households. The work would have been impossible without the help of student researchers, Kear said.

"It was really fascinating to see some undergraduate students that I've worked with in my classes out there in the field, collecting data, analyzing the data, and really learning what it means to be a scientist," Kear said. "No matter what field they go into, that experience of collecting real, original data, learning its limitations, how to analyze it and how to draw conclusions from it, is incredibly valuable, and it's a skill that is hard to acquire in a classroom."

More – and better – science

Students and researchers from the U of A, ASU and NAU involved in the SW-IFL convened in late September at the U of A's Environment and Natural Resources 2 building. The temperatures that day were a far cry from what students worked through over the summer, but at 97 degrees, the weather kept the heat on everyone's minds.

The convening was a chance for students across the three universities – many who had spent the summer in the field, and some who had just recently become involved in the SW-IFL – to give poster presentations on projects they undertook based on the SW-IFL field data.

Ryan, in addition to his contributions as a HeatMapper, also studied whether artificial intelligence-powered large language models could reliably develop heat action plans that local governments could use to mitigate the effects of heat. His early findings suggested that the two publicly available climate-centric AI tools that he studied – called ChatClimate and ClimateGPT – are not yet able to reliably create even rough outlines of heat action plans.

"It can be so right but so wrong at the same time," Ryan said of AI's ability to create localized climate plans. "It just further validated that, even if this is a tool, you still need that person who can decode it and decipher it."

Savannah Blide, a master's student in CAPLA's planning program, got involved in SW-IFL when her studies began in August. As part of her research, Blide was tasked with studying a network of plans that the city of Tucson maintains – which includes the city's general plan, climate action plan and heat action roadmap, as well as smaller plans specific to certain neighborhoods – and analyzing how each plan addresses the impacts from heat.

Blide said her involvement in the SW-IFL has already complemented the lessons from her coursework, and vice versa.

"It's great to be able to just be included after arriving on campus and meet people from across a lot of different disciplines," Blide said. "It's kind of like getting work experience as opposed to just being in school. It was really important to me when I was selecting a master's program that I would have opportunities like this."

Keith, who leads the U of A's SW-IFL involvement, said more than 150 students from across the three state universities have participated in SW-IFL research since it began in 2022. As part of his work leading the university's Heat Resilience Initiative, Keith will help oversee efforts to translate their findings into actionable solutions, such as plans or policy recommendations, to help communities in Arizona protect their residents from increasingly hotter climates.

That process, too, will undoubtedly continue to benefit from the help of students, Keith said.

"It's really critical to work hand-in-hand with students, because it helps their educational experience, whether they're in public health or urban planning, public administration, or what have you," Keith said. "It enhances their educational experience here at the universities, and it also improves the quality of the science and allows us to do more than we would do otherwise."