e-JUST - Environmental Justice using Urban Scalable Toolkit, a state-of-the-art GIS-based web platform, is being developed to inform local and regional decision-making regarding air quality and heat in the Chicago metropolitan area, utilizing Earth science and high-resolution climate model outputs. e-JUST contributes to mitigating risks associated with extreme heat and air pollution by improving decision-making related to heat and air quality stressors in the Chicago metropolitan region. e-JUST technology architecture involves ReactJS, Vega-Lite, and Urban Toolkit's functionalities. e-JUST integrates a variety of meteorological and air quality datasets. Among these are NASA’s remote sensing observations, such as GOES 16 and ECOSTRESS, that measure surface temperatures at 100 m and hourly intervals. The environmental data layers include high-resolution (1 km and higher) outputs from urban climate models related to temperature, NO2 and PM2.5, ozone, and other pollutants. To account for demographic data, we use the 2020 US Census. Our data fusion approaches include further downscaling environmental data layers to street scale using machine learning algorithms for spatiotemporal interpolation, enabling more accurate predictions at scales relevant to communities. e-JUST’s statistical view includes a heat matrix that illustrates correlations between several environmental and socioeconomic variables at a grid point in time, as well as a scatterplot that allows users to compare observed data and forecasts of two different variables. Overall, this toolkit provides information for the near past and near-real-time forecasting to aid in decision-making and emergency management preparedness for Chicago communities. Additionally, our platform is designed to provide users with easy access to data, enabling them to view and analyze data immediately. The e-JUST toolkit is anticipated to benefit a wide audience, ranging from the general public to academic researchers.

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Sharma, A., Veiga, C., Li, P., Miranda, F., Moreira,G., Wu, S., Budhathoki, M., Tiwari, A., Wei, J., Turk, M., Makra, E., e-JUST - Environmental Justice using Urban Scalable Toolkit, American Meteorological Society 104th Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD, January 28th, 2024. https://ams.confex.com/ams/104ANNUAL/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/434110