MIT Outdoor Heat Project
Advancing Climate Resilience Through Summer Heat Mapping
As part of MIT’s commitment to climate resilience, a collaborative team of staff, faculty, and students is studying temperature variations across our outdoor spaces each summer.
With climate change bringing more 90-degree days to the Boston area, this project directly supports MIT’s Climate Resilience and Adaptation Roadmap. By monitoring temperatures in and around campus, we are gathering the baseline data needed to inform practical strategies that will help our community adapt to rising heat.
Data Logger Network
Each summer, we deploy a network of air temperature and humidity data loggers across outdoor corridors, gathering spaces, and recreational areas. These sensors continuously log temperature and humidity day and night. This effort builds on strong, ongoing collaborations across the Institute and beyond, bringing together MIT Architecture, the Urban Risk Lab, the MIT Office of Sustainability (MITOS), Course 6.900 (Engineering for Impact), and the City of Cambridge.
While collecting environmental data is a core component of this work, the project also seeks to understand how our community experiences and navigates outdoor heat on the MIT campus and provides workshops and engagement opportunities to get involved.
Data Dashboard
We are currently developing a dashboard to clearly visualize the data collected by our sensor network. This dashboard will be available to the MIT Community soon.
Community Resources
Check back soon, and we will provide the technical details of our summer heat sensor network and protocol.
Learn More
If you have any questions, or have seen a sensor around campus and want to learn more, please email: sustainablemit@mit.edu
Related Links
Summer student projects tackle sustainability challenges on campus and beyond, MIT Climate Project
Collaborative effort supports an MIT resilient to the impacts of extreme heat, MIT News
Where did we put data loggers for the summer of 2026?