After traipsing around the city on a particularly steamy 95-degree day, urban visualization addict Nickolay Lamm procured a thermal imaging camera and set out to document exactly how hot New York City is?and figure out why it's so much sweatier than its surrounding areas. Working this time with the support of self-storage search engine StorageFront.com, he did just that, capturing the range of scorching degrees in typical urban sites, from a standard crosswalk and sidewalk to Grand Central Station and One World Trade Center. Lamm enlisted the University of Chicago's John E. Frederick to explain why we see what we see in scientific terms. As for the Times Squares scene pictured above, the electric screens generate heat, appearing red, as does human metabolism, so people are also pictured as red relative to their cooler surroundings in green. "The combination of energy use and high population density acts to increase the air temperature in a large, concentrated urban area," Frederick says, "although the overall effect of human metabolism is small compared to other sources of urban heating."
· All Nickolay Lamm projects [Curbed]
Loading comments...