Repurposing mesoscale traffic models for insights into traveler heat exposure

Climate change is poised to significantly increase people's heat exposure, yet there remain limited insights into how individuals experience heat in the conjunction of behavior and infrastructure. We developed a simulation platform - Icarus - to estimate traveler's heat exposure at both personal and population scales at the interface of travel behavior, microclimate, and the built environment. Icarus is applied to the Phoenix metropolitan region as a case study using three different temperature measurements: air temperature (T_air), mean radiant temperature (T_MRT), and wet bulb globe temperature (T_WBGT). The case study analysis shows that travel patterns (such as trip duration and the trip start time) for different demographic groups affect personal and population heat exposure. Different temperature measures also resulted in widely varying estimates of personal heat exposure.