MISSOULA — Missoula County on Tuesday signed an agreement with the Museum of Life and Sciences to conduct a heat monitoring campaign later this year.
Allie Kane, a climate action program coordinator with the county, said the county was awarded a $10,000 stipend and status as a Community Science Partner from the Museum of Life and Sciences, along with the Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring.
The program plans to make a larger announcement in the coming days, Kane said. The stipend covers the cost of volunteer incentives, food and water, and organizational support.
“We'll gear anything like that to make this campaign big throughout our community,” said Kane. “This is for a one-day heat watch over 100 square miles. We'll be talking to stakeholders to figure out some points of interest and where those locations should be.”
The Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring represents a national collaboration between science museums and technical experts. The program supports observations and data collection related to extreme heat to evaluate heat risk and exposure at the local level.
“Heat doesn’t impact everyone in the same way,” the program states. “We believe that projects designed with community in mind, where the data collected with and by people who are connected to the place being studied, on terms set by the community, ultimately leads to better science and more actionable outcomes.”
Kane said the local effort will partner with forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Missoula to find a window in time where high temperatures are forecast, and with little risk of storms or cloud cover.
Kane said study locations haven't been pinned down.
“We're hoping to catch the City of Missoula and points of interest, depending on what our stakeholders feel is important,” Kane said. “We could wing it out to the Wye and Frenchtown, or Bonner and East Missoula, and down to Lolo. We also talked about doing a node at Seeley Lake.”
The study will take place this year, though the future of NOAA remains uncertain under the Trump administration.
“We are moving ahead as if everything is good to go,” Kane said.
