isabella232 / heat-poverty-station-share

For NPR member stations

NPR Heat Poverty Investigation

Note: This is being made available early as a preview for reporters at NPR member stations. The full data and code will be made available when our story publishes on npr.org.

Important data fields

GEOID: The Census ID number for this tract. Can be used to combine with other fields (income, education, age, etc.)

GEO_ID: GEOID written a longer way - sometimes you'll need to match with this format.

median_hou: Median household income for the Census tract as of 2017. If you want to dive deeper, it's Census variable "B19013_001E": "Median household income in the past 12 months"

total_popu: Population of the Census tract as of 2017

white_popu: White population of the Census tract as of 2017

_median: The median raster pixel heat value for the Census tract in degrees kelvin. Note this is surface temperature, not ambient temperature.

Simplified files

Also in the geojsons folder is a folder called simpl. This has city .geojsons with simplified polygons for mapping on the web. These are used in NPR's web maps.

Caveats

• There is a difference between poverty vs. low-income
• More detailed Census geography = larger MOE
• We're using surface temperature, not ambient temperature
• Only one day of data per city
• Not every city is counted
• Some cities split satellite scene paths/rows, so we took the image from the scene that contained most of the city. You'll need to filter out tracts without heat data in any data analysis/mapping you do.