Boynton Beach Health and Air Quality: Assessing Urban Heat and Tree Canopy to Inform Urban Planning at Boynton Beach, FL

Boynton Beach, Florida, experiences the urban heat island effect, where temperatures in the city are significantly higher than in surrounding rural areas due to urbanization and declining tree canopy cover. Population growth exacerbates this effect by increasing impervious surfaces and reducing green space, highlighting the need for heat mitigation strategies. The City of Boynton Beach partnered with NASA DEVELOP to improve decision-making related to urban heat and environmental resilience. Using NASA Earth observations and ancillary datasets, we mapped urban heat, tree canopy coverage, and heat vulnerability from 2013 to 2024. For urban heat mapping, we utilized Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) and Landsat 9 OLI-2/TIRS-2 for daytime land surface temperature and albedo. The evapotranspiration and nighttime land surface temperature data were acquired from the ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station. We assessed heat vulnerability by integrating urban heat data with asthma prevalence from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s PLACES initiative. The results identified distinct patterns of urban heat, with the downtown area and neighborhoods with low tree canopy being the primary hotspots. These findings offer targeted insights to the City of Boynton Beach for interventions to reduce heat stress and promote climate resilience in vulnerable areas. They provide further information to guide urban planning, tree planting, and cooling center placement to mitigate heat impacts in Boynton Beach.