Link to data
Prepared by: Kathryn Foster, Cornell University
Date: August 2026
Authors: Arizona State University’s Knowledge Exchange for Resilience and the U.S Census Bureau, Department of Commerce
About: The Community Resilience Estimates (CRE) for Heat data builds from CRE measures of social vulnerability and community resilience to disasters to adjust CRE’s social vulnerability components to be relevanttoextreme heat exposure. The data is derived fromtheAmerican Community Survey (ACS), Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program(PEP), theAmerican Housing Survey (AHS), and the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR). The CRE for Heat measures heat exposure and social vulnerability at thenational,state, county, and tract-level.
Data are available on: The CRE for Heat measures components of social vulnerability at the household and individual level. The original CRE provides a metric of social vulnerability and resilience to disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and pandemics. However, does not include measures specifically for extreme heat exposure. To account for this, the Census Bureau partnered with Arizona State University’s Knowledge Exchange for Resilience to develop measures of social vulnerability to extreme heat.
The CRE for Heat provides more social vulnerability indicators such as whether a household’s housing costs are more the 50%, housing structure type, individual’s commute type (public transit, walking, biking, personal vehicle, or non-personal vehicle), and households that potentially lack air conditioning. While the 2019 CRE for Heat only examined social vulnerability to an extreme heat event, the 2022 release provides heat exposure data based on air temperature and wet bulb temperature spatially joining temperature data to Census geographies.
These data may be particularly helpful to researchers and practitioners who are interested in older populations’ risks to extreme heat. As past research has shown that older adults are more vulnerable to climate risks, the CRE for Heat, in combination with other datasets, may provide pathways for identifying social vulnerabilities at the intersection of heat exposure and aging.
Additional Resources for the CRE for Heat data:
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/community-resilience-estimates.html
For additional questions about the data please contact: sehsd.cre@census.gov