On scorching Texas summer days, temperatures inside homes without air conditioning can get up to 120 degrees, with negative health impacts for residents.

A research team at UT San Antonio is trying to help find solutions to this problem on the city’s west side with a pilot project conducted by the school’s Urban Heat Island Research Team in partnership with the Historic West Side Neighborhood Association.

Esteban López Ochoa, an associate professor of urban and regional planning at UTSA who’s leading the project, said that urban heat islands occur when there is not enough green space.

“The perfect analogy to this is cooking barbacoa, which is very ubiquitous to South Texas and San Antonio,” he said. “You heat up stones and you dig the hole and put the stuff in, and then the barbacoa gets cooked overnight with just the heating of the stones. … The same thing is happening to our city where lots of concrete gets the sun exposure during the day, sucks in that heat, and then at night it’s just releasing that heat to us.”

A group of professors at UTSA has been collaborating for the past several years to understand where heat is having the most impact in San Antonio and what can be done about it.

“We’ve been collaborating with the city of San Antonio to create a heat plus equity index where we can tell what block groups of the space are the hottest in the city, so the city can prioritize what neighborhoods to implement heat mitigation measures first,” López Ochoa said. “We went into the ground with communities to deploy housing condition inventory first because we understood that housing conditions are perhaps the most overlooked item that we should be looking at when we want to increase urban thermal comfort.”

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This research has allowed researchers to target specific houses with solutions, López Ochoa said.

“For example, [one house] didn’t have a roof and [we gave] them a new cool roof,” he said. “And that’s been great in a way because residents are now seeing how city resources are efficiently and being targeted to people that need it the most.”

Researchers are using artificial intelligence to help find ways to spend city resources to make the most difference for the most people.

“Each house is different, and each house is aging and needs different types of repairs,” López Ochoa said. “The idea of using AI is how can we use it and leverage the power of computing to be able to deploy digital twins, which is a digital replica of these houses to understand what is the most contributing factor that we can change in the house that will help the most to increase cooling effects or warmer effects, depending on the season, on these homes.”

For example, instead of maybe weatherizing the whole house and putting all the insulation in all walls, AI helps determine where insulation would make the biggest difference, López Ochoa said.

“We can improve urban thermal comforts in a step-by-step process, but create a workflow and not put a cookie-cutter approach to home weatherization and home rehab,” he said. “AI is super powerful when you have a big problem and try to break it into pieces and help us understand how we can [solve] that the best.”

López Ochoa said his team started with the west side of San Antonio because it neighbors the university and is a vulnerable community. But ultimately, many parts of Texas should be able to benefit from their research.

“This is very critical, not just in San Antonio, even, but for communities in southwest Texas where you have colonias and for all the of the Valley – basically, McAllen, Hidalgo County; those counties are experiencing even hotter temperatures, 97 days over 100 degrees in 2023,” he said. “We cannot have people having heat strokes every summer and not dealing with the consequences of that and then still expect from them to be super functional and productive when we are having them in heat traps and sleeping in what it’s basically an oven in their houses.”