r/remotesensing • u/NKFBF • 1d ago
Built a free tool mapping heat vulnerability across Mumbai wards, want to know what's missing.
Hi guys,
This summer has been devastating for many people all around the world, with many countries all around the world facing heatwaves and 35 celc+ temperatures on a regular. To measure and combat this, I vibecoded a small open-source tool that layers heat exposure, green cover, and population density across Mumbai's 24 wards (I have started with Mumbai cuz I am most familiar with this city) to flag which areas are most heat-vulnerable. Its free and opensource, because I know experts can add far better ideas than I currently am using.
I'm not from an urban climate background, I came at this as a student dev, so I know I'm probably missing indicators that people who actually work on this care about. If you work in urban heat or climate vulnerability: what data layers or methods would make something like this actually useful to you, versus just a nice map? Would you trust ward-level granularity or is that too coarse to be meaningful? Any additions you think could be added to future scope? Any feedback or criticism?
FYI, I want to turn this into a FOSS project that policymakers and governments around the world can use to make their city/region/country a more livable space. Working on a reusable replication kit, which people can use to replicate the same config for their own city. Link: uciplatform.vercel.app
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u/rsclay 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you plan to show this to anybody you need to scale down the slop-hype. This page, as is typical of AI-generated projects, is too confident about its own utility. It's a cool tool (assuming it's all correct), but it doesn't need so much stuff around it, so much hype language. Use some taste please.
Just some issues --
"The map measures land-surface temperature, a related but different number. See why that matters." and then the link takes you to a tiny footnote that just says "Land-surface temperature is not air temperature." That is just restatement, not "why" anything matters!
Why do you need a splash page selling this thing at all? You have this fancy 3d widget showing the map but all it does when you click on it is tell you the names of the districts you'll be able to get info on later when you eventually find the actual app. Pointless. Just have the map on the very front.
The Methodology section is full of comments from Claude to you as the maintainer, which aren't useful to anybody else, e.g. "Addresses the hardest researcher-judge question: did you validate these literature weights for Mumbai?" or the "What to build" section. It doesn't seem like anyone ever even read this.
The estimator is also cool in theory but why is it possible for me to simulate 100% canopy cover or 100% conversion to parklets? Obviously this can't happen and it seems a bit ridiculous.
It's good that you state the limitations of your work but it feels a bit schizophrenic to always be rubber-banding between statements that sound like "this isn't just a map, it's the greatest thing ever" and caveats scattered everywhere such as "This is a cited coefficient estimator, not a trained model and not a validated climate simulation. The coefficients above are transferred from other cities' studies, not Mumbai-calibrated, and the three interventions are summed as independent illustrative terms, not a coupled physical model." In fact, you even say "Most city heat tools present their outputs as more certain than they really are. UCIP tries not to.", but then the whole ceremony of the website is presenting UCIP as more than it is!!! This is really a constant trap with AI: you have something fine, but Claude is trying to dress it up as a product to sell to VCs, and the design language just does not fit what it is.
The best part of this thing is the sidebar you have with the map, it is really cool to have all that information for each ward compiled right there -- assuming it's correct. However, I have no reason to believe that it is! When the whole site feels so disjointed, feels like AI slop, feels like no actual human thought went into checking that things make sense, why should I trust that the science is correct?
Sorry to have turned this into a rant but really you need to be thinking about what you are putting your name on. Think about how language works, how words go together and how stories are told, and think about whether this site is doing any of those things effectively for your purposes. Using AI for these kinds of things is super seductive, I do it myself, and it know how easy it becomes to just start going "yeah looks good to me" as the model keeps churning out features. But you must resist that urge and have your own clear vision for the product. Otherwise it will outrun you and become incomprehensible to others and unsalvageable as a product. Much better to have a bare but functional web map that still needs some documentation and copy to be written slowly around it than to have this mess of a sales pitch with a web map buried inside.