The Resiliency Exposure Forecast for Outdoor Heat serves as an effort to evaluate the scope of planned adaption initiatives and their potential to reduce exposure to increasing temperatures in future decades. The Outdoor Heat Forecast projects temperatures across city neighborhoods using an urban heat flux model. This is broken into two main subsections: 1) a Control Scenario to determine future neighborhood-level temperature in the absence of new adaptation interventions and progress, and 2) a Planned Action Scenario to determine how tree canopy expansion could change heat profiles compared to the Control Scenario. This dataset defines the Planned Actions as tree canopy growth being maintained across jurisdictions, which requires efforts by private and public landowners, and being expanded through the NYC Parks Department’s Neighborhood Tree Planting Program. This is based on data from the Neighborhood Tree Planting Program plans, Land Cover raster data from the city's Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) assessments, and the Surface Urban Energy and Water Balance Scheme (SUEWS) tool. Temperature projections should only be compared to the baseline for this exercise, and not other models, as they hold separate assumptions that this evaluation may not account for. The overarching measure is the amount of extreme heat by the 2050s that is managed by projected tree canopy expansion.
For more information on the components of the data set, please visit OMB's Technical Appendix for the FY 2026 Climate Budgeting Publication. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/exec25/exec25-nyccbta.pdf