scholarly journals Urban climate studies in a subtropical location: literature review and current perspectives for Curitiba, Brazil

2015 ◽  
pp. 55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Kruger ◽  
Cintia Tamura
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
Climate Studies

scholarly journals Learning to Chill: The Role of Design Schools and Professional Training to Improve Urban Climate and Urban Metabolism

Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 2243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Taleghani ◽  
Azadeh Montazami ◽  
Daniela Perrotti
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
Field Measurements ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Urban Heat Islands ◽  
Urban Metabolism ◽  
Mortality And Morbidity ◽  
Urban Heat ◽  
Climate Studies

The increased frequency of heat-related mortality and morbidity in urban environments indicates the importance of urban climate studies. As most of the world’s population lives in cities, the education of designers, planners and policy makers is crucial to promote urban sustainability This paper, firstly, focuses on the different factors causing the urban heat islands in large cities. Secondly, it considers how these factors are reflected in higher education programmes. Examples are shown from courses in UK higher education, explaining the common software tools used for simulating urban spaces, and student field measurements are drawn on to illustrate how urban climate studies are included in higher education curricula. Urban metabolism is used to conceptualise the main approach to systemic resource-use assessments and as a holistic framework to investigate the main drivers of the urban heat island phenomenon. To sum up, this paper reflects on the importance of training climatically-aware graduates from design schools.

scholarly journals Can local fieldwork help to represent intra-urban variability of canopy parameters relevant for tropical African climate studies?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Van de Walle ◽  
Oscar Brousse ◽  
Lien Arnalsteen ◽  
Disan Byarugaba ◽  
Daniel S. Ddumba ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Building Materials ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
Boreal Summer ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Local Climate ◽  
African Cities ◽  
Climate Studies ◽  
Urban Characteristics

AbstractRapid and uncontrolled urbanization in tropical Africa is increasingly leading to unprecedented socio-economical and environmental challenges in cities, particularly urban heat and climate change. The latter calls for a better representation of tropical African cities’ properties relevant for urban climate studies. Here, we demonstrate the possibility of collecting urban canopy parameters during a field campaign in the boreal summer months of 2018 for deriving a Local Climate Zone (LCZ) map and for improving the physical representation of climate-relevant urban morphological, thermal and radiative characteristics. The comparison of the resulting field-derived LCZ map with an existing map obtained from the World Urban Data and Access Portal Tool framework shows large differences. In particular, our map results in more vegetated open low-rise classes. In addition, site-specific fieldwork-derived urban characteristics are compared against the LCZ universal parameters. The latter shows that our fieldwork adds important information to the universal parameters by more specifically considering the presence of corrugated metal in the city of Kampala. This material is a typical roofing material found in densely built environments and informal settlements. It leads to lower thermal emissivity but higher thermal conductivity and capacity of buildings. To illustrate the importance of site-specific urban parameters, the newly derived site-specific urban characteristics are used as input fields to an urban parametrization scheme embedded in the regional climate model COSMO-CLM. This implementations decreases the surface temperature bias from 5.34 to 3.97 K. Based on our results, we recommend future research on tropical African cities to focus on a detailed representation of cities, with particular attention to impervious surface fraction and building materials.

scholarly journals 3D GEO-INFORMATION IN URBAN CLIMATE STUDIES

2016 ◽  
Vol XLII-2/W2 ◽  
pp. 51-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Petrescu ◽  
M. Aldea ◽  
O. Luca ◽  
C. Iacoboaea ◽  
F. Gaman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Numerical Models ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Human Comfort ◽  
Climate Studies

3D geo-information is essential for urban climate studies. It is obvious that both natural environment and built-up environment play the fundamental role in defining the climatic conditions for urban areas, which affect the quality of human life and human comfort. The paper presents the main categories of 3D geo-information used in urban climate studies and roles in creating and operating the numerical models specially designed to simulate urban planning scenarios and improvement of the urban climate situation.

scholarly journals Quantifying Local and Mesoscale Drivers of the Urban Heat Island of Moscow with Reference and Crowdsourced Observations

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikhail Varentsov ◽  
Daniel Fenner ◽  
Fred Meier ◽  
Timofey Samsonov ◽  
Matthias Demuzere
Keyword(s):  
Urban Heat Island ◽  
Air Temperature ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
Winter Season ◽  
Local Scale ◽  
Driving Factors ◽  
Heat Island ◽  
Local Climate Zones ◽  
Urban Heat ◽  
Climate Studies

Urban climate features, such as the urban heat island (UHI), are determined by various factors characterizing the modifications of the surface by the built environment and human activity. These factors are often attributed to the local spatial scale (hundreds of meters up to several kilometers). Nowadays, more and more urban climate studies utilize the concept of the local climate zones (LCZs) as a proxy for urban climate heterogeneity. However, for modern megacities that extend to dozens of kilometers, it is reasonable to suggest a significant contribution of the larger-scale factors to the temperature and UHI climatology. In this study, we investigate the contribution of local-scale and mesoscale driving factors of the nocturnal canopy layer UHI of the Moscow megacity in Russia. The study is based on air temperature observations from a dense network consisting of around 80 reference and more than 1,500 crowdsourced citizen weather stations for a summer and a winter season. For the crowdsourcing data, an advanced quality control algorithm is proposed. Based on both types of data, we show that the spatial patterns of the UHI are shaped both by local-scale and mesoscale driving factors. The local drivers represent the surface features in the vicinity of a few hundred meters and can be described by the LCZ concept. The mesoscale drivers represent the influence of the surrounding urban areas in the vicinity of 2–20 km around a station, transformed by diffusion, and advection in the atmospheric boundary layer. The contribution of the mesoscale drivers is reflected in air temperature differences between similar LCZs in different parts of the megacity and in a dependence between the UHI intensity and the distance from the city center. Using high-resolution city-descriptive parameters and different statistical analysis, we quantified the contributions of the local- and mesoscale driving factors. For selected cases with a pronounced nocturnal UHI, their respective contributions are of similar magnitude. Our findings highlight the importance of taking both local- and mesoscale effects in urban climate studies for megacities into account. Furthermore, they underscore a need for an extension of the LCZ concept to take mesoscale settings of the urban environment into account.

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