Originally published in Inside Climate News.
“It was a no brainer, Ben Zaitchik thought, standing outside in hiking shorts and a t-shirt. What else to wear on a day when the temperature was set to soar above 90 degrees? The air felt stuffy on this muggy afternoon in late August.
A professor and climate scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Zaitchik and his graduate assistant, Ali Eyni, prepared to ride bicycles on a 17-mile loop of the city, measuring maximum temperatures at the height of a blistering heat wave to record temperature variations between neighborhoods with little tree canopy and those with better tree cover and more green spaces. “