Summer in the city - Forecasting and Mapping Human Thermal Comfort in Urban Areas

Demographic studies show an on-going migration of humans toward (sub)urban areas. This urban shift evokes the question how urbanization affects human thermal comfort and health, especially for vulnerable groups such as the elderly and people with health issues. Physical properties of the urban material are often such that thermal human comfort, work productivity and public health are worse than on the surrounding countryside, particularly on hot summer days. The goal of the current work is to develop a novel prototype hourly forecasting system for human thermal comfort in urban areas on street level, which can be exploited by weather and health agencies for urban weather forecasting and heat wave warnings. The proposed thermal comfort forecasting system for cities, will be validated using novel observations from fixed meteorological stations in urban areas, bike traverses by mobile platforms (cargo bikes) equipped with state-of-the-art meteorological measurement devices (Heusinkveld et al., 2013) and stations operated by hobby meteorologists (Steeneveld et al., 2011). Within the framework of this work, the system will be validated for a number of warm weather conditions episodes in Dutch cities that differ with respect to their morphological characteristics, topography and land use in the surrounding rural areas. At the conference, the first results of the observational and modelling efforts will be shown for the town of Wageningen, NL.

References: Heusinkveld, B.G. G.J. Steeneveld, L.W.A. van Hove, C.M.J. Jacobs, and A.A.M. Holtslag 2013: Spatial variability of the Rotterdam urban heat island as influenced by urban land use, J. Geophys. Res, in press, doi: 10.1002/2012JD019399

Steeneveld, G.J., S. Koopmans, B.G. Heusinkveld, L.W.A. van Hove, and A.A.M. Holtslag,2011: Quantifying urban heat island effects and human comfort for cities of variable size and urban morphology in The Netherlands., J. Geophys. Res., 116, D20129, doi:10.1029/2011JD015988.