A Weather Station With Wheels

The problem with professional-grade weather equipment, says the University of Buffalo architecture professor Nicholas Rajkovich, is that it’s expensive. Though technology is getting cheaper all the time, amateurs can spend between $500 and $2,500 setting up informal monitoring systems in their backyards. Local governments often shell out tens of thousands of dollars. And that’s just for one weather station—setting up a network of research-grade weather stations across a city is a staggeringly expensive undertaking.

That cities’ surface, air, and soil temperatures are generally warmer than rural areas’ is uncontested—the heat-trapping materials used in urban construction, and dearth of surface water and vegetation nearly ensure it. But exactly what cities should be doing to combat site-specific urban heat islands is, well, hotly contested, which is where the real scientists come in.