Abstract
High ambient summertime temperatures are an increasing health concern with climate change (1). This is a particular concern for minoritized households in the United States, for which differential energy burden may compromise their adaptive capacity to high temperatures (2-14). Using a fine-scaled spatiotemporal air temperature model and U.S. census data, we examined local (within-county) differences in warm season cooling degree days (CDDs) by ethnoracial group as a proxy for local energy demand across states of the northeast and mid-Atlantic U.S. in 2003–2019. Using state-specific regression models with fixed effects for year and county, we found that Black and Latino people consistently experienced more CDDs, non-Hispanic white people experienced cooler summers, and Asian populations showed mixed results. We also explored a concentration-based measure of residential segregation for each ethnoracial group as one possible pathway towards temperature disparities. The measure was constructed using a Gaussian kernel density smoothing procedure of population-weighted census tract centroids per county. We included the segregation measure as a smooth term in a generalized additive model adjusted for county and year as well as a tensor smooth for census tract centroids. The results were nonlinear, but higher concentrations of white people were associated with lower annual CDDs and higher concentrations of Latino people were associated with higher annual CDDs than the county average. Concentrations for Black and Asian people were nonmonotonic, sometimes with bowed associations. These findings suggest that present-day residential segregation, as measured by ethnoracial subgroup concentrations, may contribute to summertime air temperature disparities and influence adaptive capacity.