Grant: Project Grant

This study will make several important contributions to advance our understanding of within-city variations in summer heat impacts on respiratory, cardiovascular, and mental health outcomes. Dense networks of ground-level outdoor air temperature/relative humidity monitors will be deployed for four consecutive summers (2022-2025) in Montreal and Toronto to provide unprecedented spatial and temporal coverage of urban air temperatures/relative humidity in each city. Using these data, we will develop state-of-the-art models to predict fine-scale variations in temperature across each city using information on building characteristics, land use, land cover, and traditional fixed-site weather data. In addition, model predictions will be assigned to a large database of street-level and satellite images (approximately 100,000 images) to train new deep neural networks to predict hot-spots in summer air temperature using digital images as model inputs. We will also examine how access to social infrastructure (e.g., green spaces, public pools, splash-pads, cool-down centers) may modify associations between summer air temperatures and acute cardiorespiratory/mental health outcomes using a unique database under development by our collaborators at Statistics Canada. This analysis will help to identify possible interventions to minimize heat impacts on public health in urban areas. We have partnered with public health officials in Toronto and Montreal to ensure that our findings are translated directly to important knowledge users in each city