Using Remote Sensing to Catalyze Urban Climate Studies in Underserved Communities

For too many undergraduate minority students, remote sensing and its plethora of applications to geophysics yet remain new, foreign, and mysterious. These students, even with the requisite STEM backgrounds, lack the exposure, the awareness, the understanding, and the engagement in the foray of remote sensing and the unique lens it provides to probe and unearth new ways of gaining knowledge about the environment. To strengthen undergraduate education, to adequately prepare candidates to become the next generation of geoscientists, to empower and sustain underserved neighborhoods, and to assist in replenishing the geoscience workforce, unique paradigms of teaching and learning about remote sensing are needed. At the Center for Remote Sensing and Earth System Sciences (ReSESS) at the New York City College of Technology (City Tech), remote sensing is used as a catalyst to attract and to engage students from underserved communities in studying urban climate within their local neighborhoods. Results indicate that this approach of using remote sensing to attract students to urban climate increased awareness and understanding in the geosciences, and it motivated students to share their newfound knowledge in environmental sustainability initiatives with their fellow local citizens.