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Comment by clumsysmurf | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in Phoenix for 30 years. I had no problems with the heat until now. The heat island effect is real; it gets hotter, and stay hotter longer. I was leaving for my daily walks in summer when it dropped to 97°F at around midnight.

If you watch the radar during monsoon season, you'll see the city's heat island cuts through large storm systems like a knife through butter, so the monsoon rains rarely make it here now. With the population growth, the ozone has gotten worse in the summer and the temperature inversions trapping PM2.5 worse in the winter.

Exposure to particulates and ozone are bad for your health. I do not recommend Phoenix for these reasons.

EDIT: I wanted to add, every day I saw our poor USPS postal worker practically melting in that old contraption they call a vehicle. I hope they find a way to keep them cool soon.

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Phoenix has been a concrete jungle for as long as I can remember. It’s consistently hotter than Tucson despite being 100 miles north and only 1000 feet lower in elevation.

I sometimes wonder how much the city could do to help itself by drastically changing its urban planning process.

Add trees (mesquite does well in Tucson) where possible. Cover any blacktop with solar. Use highly reflective/white paints or rock for exposed surfaces. Implement reasonable public transit… except it’s notoriously hard to design for such sprawl.

Another fun idea would be to dig deep and create large subsurface buildings to reduce AC usage.

There are so many buildings in the southwest that are built to withstand the temperature differences 100 years ago. Seems like a new standard needs to be adopted.

Unfortunately much of Phoenix is covered with a hard layer of soil known as caliche that is expensive to dig through, meaning that most houses don’t even have basements. But if it saves a lot of money on cooling it might be worth it.

Developers don't care about cost of operation, only cost to build. If there weren't efficiency rules in building codes developers would still be building houses with paper walls here for $750K.

Wonder if adding ~8 feet (a typical basement dig depth) of fill could be less expensive? After basement floor is built? Perhaps a development could be planned around this. Or, the lower floor of entire neighborhoods could be turned into basements, with stories added as desired. Areas of cities have been raised in similar manner, for different reasons, eg after a flood in Sacramento, after a fire in Seattle.

Burying a basement layer above existing grade is interesting. I hadn’t considered the possibility of backfill to create more thermal mass but it makes sense to me. It would require importing a fair amount of material though. I would need to understand where that material comes from and the overall impact it would have to do it at scale.

> Implement reasonable public transit

I agree this is the right idea, but you may have seen other commenters in this thread talking about how Phoenix is fine because you can just go from your AC car to your AC garage without having to walk in the heat. Imagine how people like this will react when you tell them they'll have to walk to a train stop!

This sounds like the DFW metroplex as well, only it's referred as a dome or cap around here. The same thing can be seen where lines of thunderstorms barrel through until it hits the metroplex. Once it hits the west side, it starts to break up, and then regain strength on the east side.

We also get the weather alerts basically saying to not breathe outside.

They both sound like China 10-20 years ago.

China generally has permanent APEC blue now. Hope the US catches up!

China has done a good job cleaning up pollution in its major cities, but it has not solved the heat problem, if anything this summer was the hottest ever in southern China.

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