Milton Keynes, Thursday 13 August 2026

On the hottest day of the summer, 69% of Milton Keynes' footpaths reached very strong heat stress.

That is a feels-like temperature of 38 °C or more, for at least an hour.

The code
Air peaked at 36 °C
6am9am12pm3pm6pm

Hours that felt like 38 °C or more

None1–23–45 or more
Not modelled: built since the lidar flight, or under a bridge or roof

How this was made

Environment Agency lidar flown in winter 2020–21 gives the shape of the whole area. A custom deep-learning model sorts its points into ground, buildings, trees and water. SOLWEIG (Lindberg et al. 2008) then follows the sun over those buildings and trees hour by hour on 13 August 2026 and works out the radiant heat a person takes in on each 1 m square. With each hour's air temperature, humidity, wind and sunshine from the Met Office's 2 km UKV model, that gives the feels-like temperature (UTCI). Footpaths are from OpenStreetMap and bus stops from NaPTAN; places built since the flight are greyed. New trees are placed as TreePlanter does (Wallenberg et al. 2022).

© OpenStreetMap contributors · Protomaps · Lidar © Environment Agency · NaPTAN © DfT · Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026 · Built-up area: ONS · Weather: Met Office UKV (CC BY-SA 4.0), weather data by Open-Meteo.com · MapLibre

The code and its references: github.com/JacobWeinbren/mk-heat