When summer turns up the heat, Brick City bakes like a brick oven. Newark’s sidewalks, streets, parking lots and blocks of close-packed buildings — with scant shade in an almost-treeless landscape — cook up temperatures that can soar six to 10 degrees higher than suburbs just a few miles away.
Greg Pope, professor of Earth and Environmental Studies at Montclair State University, studies these so-called “urban heat islands”— cityscapes that soak up the sun’s energy and then radiate it back. “That sort of surface — rooftops, buildings, pavement — absorbs solar energy better than other surfaces,” Pope said. It “helps heat it up during the day, but especially heats it up more during night, when it releases that heat back to the atmosphere. So our nighttime temperatures don’t get as cool, which means it’s easier to heat up the next morning.”
