Artificial Intelligence now drives Google's innovative heat tolerance technology
Google has unveiled a groundbreaking heat resilience tool, utilizing artificial intelligence, satellite, and aerial imagery to provide cities with vital data about summer surface temperatures. This tool is part of Google's expanding suite of climate adaptation assets, which also includes flood monitoring and wildfire tracking.
The heat resilience tool offers a detailed map of average summer surface temperatures, census tracts, and the presence or absence of trees and cool roofs in any given neighborhood. It allows cities to target their cooling interventions towards the areas that need them the most, potentially reducing peak energy demand for cooling by up to 27%.
Miami-Dade County is one of the 14 cities currently piloting the heat resilience tool. The county plans to use the information from the tool to develop policies encouraging developers to take heat mitigation measures.
The Power Resilience Forum 2026, scheduled to take place in Houston, TX from January 21-23, 2026, is focusing on utility planning and operation for grid resilience in extreme weather. Registration for the forum is available, and early bird pricing ends on October 1.
The heat resilience tool is considered an opportunity for innovation by investors and other major players in climate resiliency. Mansi Kansal, a research product manager at Google, stated that the tool was developed in response to the need for cities to understand how they can implement strategies for addressing heat, characterized as a 'silent killer' due to its pervasive impact on human health.
Limited funding is a barrier cities face in implementing cooling interventions, and Google hopes that the quantifiable data from the heat resilience tool can help cities apply for grant funding. The tool now provides data about individual roofs' reflectance using AI improvements.
The cities involved in the pilot phase of Google's heat resilience tool are New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, in addition to Miami-Dade County. The launch of the heat resilience tool is part of a broader trend of climate resilience tools being developed by startups, including wildfire monitoring and climate risk assessments.
Google's climate adaptation tools originated over a decade ago, inspired by a wildfire observed from an office window in Israel. The company continues to innovate and develop solutions to combat the effects of climate change on urban areas.
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