Urban Heat Diagnostic.
Climate evidence for places and buildings, with its limits drawn in. A ten-working-day review for local authorities, housing providers, asset owners preparing physical-risk evidence and place teams deciding where heat action should begin. Using suitable open and client-supplied data, it identifies priority areas, explains the evidence behind them and records the gaps that could change the decision.
Plans and maps exist. The decision still stalls.
Teams often have climate plans, open datasets and broad heat-risk maps, but still struggle to answer:
- 01Where should attention begin?
- 02Which heat, vulnerability and place factors support that priority?
- 03What can the evidence support now, and what needs further investigation?
The service does not sell another dashboard. It delivers a bounded decision and a reusable evidence base.
Ten working days, bounded on purpose.
- One agreed geography or asset portfolio
- Up to three decision questions
- A short buyer interview and any relevant plans or thresholds
- Suitable open Earth-observation, land-cover, built-form, demographic, health-proxy and access data
- Optional client data, subject to a separate security and licence check
- Decision and data framing
- Source, licence and quality review
- Heat, exposure and place-condition analysis appropriate to the available evidence
- Priority-area and intervention-opportunity synthesis
- Review with the buyer before finalisation
- A decision brief with findings, limitations and recommended next actions
- A priority map in the format agreed during scoping
- An evidence register covering sources, licences, methods and material gaps
- A 60-minute review with the decision owner
What the evidence register looks like.
The same register grammar, from my own Westminster model: layer, source, licence and evidence class. A client register adds the method and the material gaps for each layer. This is not a client deliverable.
Westminster mapped features
- Source
- © OpenStreetMap contributors
- Licence
- ODbL 1.0
- Evidence class
- sourced
Westminster laser returns
- Source
- © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2020. All rights reserved; spatially thinned returns
- Licence
- Open Government Licence v3.0
- Evidence class
- observed
Surface heat, 10 Jul 2025, 100 m display samples
- Source
- Landsat Collection 2 Level-2 image courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.
- Licence
- Public domain
- Evidence class
- derived
Building-stock warm-day experiment
- Source
- Declared 1R1C thermal model on mapped volumes
- Licence
- Original model; geometry ODbL 1.0 and OGL v3.0
- Evidence class
- modelled
hypothetical weather and fabric, not calibrated
What this will not do.
The exclusions are part of the offer, not small print. A diagnostic you can trust has to be explicit about where it stops.
- No individual-level risk scoring or profiling.
- No medical, engineering, regulatory or investment advice, and no materiality, compliance or assurance advice.
- No future-climate prediction unless an agreed, defensible scenario source and method are in scope.
- No permanent data platform, mobile app or operational dashboard.
- No extensive primary fieldwork, sensors or community engagement unless separately scoped.
- No claim that correlation establishes causation.
Method proofs, in public.
Related work demonstrates the components used here: multi-source urban-heat research in Shaping Cool Cities, and the satellite surface-heat and mapped built-form layers, each with its licence and evidence class, in the surface-heat chapter of the Soho city model on the home page and in the Westminster lab, where the same dated Landsat surface temperature carries the provider’s per-sample uncertainty and stated limits. Climate Intelligence, a working prototype that joins a place’s climate hazards, energy systems and environmental exposure in one map console, is described in the archive. Screening proxies, not hazard models; no insured-loss estimate. Shaping Cool Cities is undergoing a methods re-audit, so it demonstrates data integration and methodological transparency, not validated service outcomes. None establishes buyer demand or impact for this pilot.
Bring one unresolved heat decision.
Send the place, decision owner, deadline and evidence already available. The fit conversation will establish whether the diagnostic is viable, needs a narrower scope or should not proceed.
Have a heat, place or climate-adaptation decision that existing maps do not resolve? Discuss it in a 30-minute fit conversation. If the diagnostic is not the right route, the conversation will end with a clear no-go or a more appropriate next step.
Fixed fee, quoted after a short fit call.