Introduction

Lockdown in Houston started officially according to the harris county police department on March 24th, 2020. This caused a lot of concern for houstonians because it would mean that they would be forced to remain indoors where heat would remain mostly insulated. This brought about the heat island effect that the Houston Harris Heat ActionTeam as well as a lot of other scientists are trying to combat by first getting heat temperatures across different neighborhoods and employing the use of GIS/thermal sensors to create heat maps to show where the hottest areas of houston are potiatlly are by driving to different neighborhoods (Carson, 2020). It was determined based on their study that August 7th tends to be the hottest temperature wise for houston; so the goal was to find was to reduce the heat accross houston, and in turn try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that possibly affect the climate. Perfect emitters of heat are 1 (black bodies) and perfect reflectors are 0.

While Houston is no stranger to heat, the pandemic serves as a motivation to reduce the heat island effect by increasing vegetation in less vegetated areas (Agone and Bhamare, 2012). Using light-colored pavements as opposed to dark-colored pavements that increase heat absorption and have reflective roofs (M.Santamouris, 2013). Houstonians are as a result, cognizant of these changes that need to occur. The goal however of this study is to see if as a result of this pandemic, it would catalyze the use of some of these methods (Rawata and ManishKumarb, 2015) to reduce the heat island effect during a lockdown or whether lockdown did not affect the rate at which emitters of heat were used. It is for this reason that change detection will be employed not only for the MODIS and ASTER data but also for Landsat data for classification of features to pinpoint the areas with the most heat and the least heat as well from 2019 to 2021. After that correlations will be made based on those heat changes observed and the changes in features over time; in part because a projected heat increase was estimated until 2065 consistently, so efforts to counteract that are paramount.

An overlooked importance for such as study likewise rests with the fact that lower-income neighborhoods tend to be the warmest according to another study. Furthermore, the prison system has a lot of documented accounts of inmate deaths as a result of the warming effects related to being locked down (Julianne et al, 2020), the thickness of the roofing (Karam et al, 2014), and nanotechnology in construction plays roles in heat transfers and emissions (Makar et al, 2003). So being aware of how well or unwell the heat changes are controlled during a pandemic is actually important.

Fig.1 Houston Heat Team Predicted Heat Image