The MEER Newsletter

Satellite albedo data is freely available worldwide, but its coarse resolution — tens of meters per pixel — cannot distinguish one rooftop from the next. That makes it hard for city planners to know which buildings most need a reflective cool-roof coating, and hard to measure results after installation.

This paper fuses openly available satellite imagery with aerial photography and deep learning to estimate albedo at the scale of individual buildings — roughly one meter resolution. Validated against field measurements, the approach can map an entire city's rooftops, flag the hottest, least-reflective surfaces, and help target MEER-style reflective cooling where it will do the most good.

Elephants cannot sweat, but their wrinkled skin traps water after a mud bath or spray, then evaporates it slowly to stay cool for hours. Architect Dorit Aviv and materials scientist Shu Yang, with Kun-Hao Yu of Syracuse University, copied that idea into a cement tile whose deliberately engineered cracks and microscopic pores capture, redistribute and slowly release water.

In building-scale tests, temperatures beneath the new tiles held around 89.6°F / 32°C — compared with 107.6°F / 42°C beneath cracked commercial stucco and 125.6°F / 52°C beneath non-cracked stucco. For roofs and façades in hot regions, evaporation-cooled tiles could cut the need for mechanical air conditioning, the same passive-cooling logic MEER applies through reflective surfaces.

Heat is the leading cause of weather-related death worldwide, yet how heat stress — what it actually feels like to the human body — has changed across the globe has been poorly quantified. Using the Universal Thermal Climate Index, which accounts for temperature, humidity, wind and radiation, this study tracks feels-like temperatures across every continent since 1950.

The findings are stark. Extreme feels-like temperatures are more frequent everywhere, the footprint of hazardous heat has expanded into previously unaffected regions, and some areas now see up to 50 additional heat-stress days a year. The hottest nights are warming faster than the hottest days (0.32°C / 0.58°F per decade versus 0.27°C / 0.49°F), and compound day-and-night heat events are more frequent, severe and prolonged — leaving people with no overnight recovery.