Impact of Environmental Factors in Variation of Temperature in Respect to Urban Heat Island, Manhattan, New York

All year around heat island forms in Manhattan, New York due to land surface modification, radiative trapping and lack of evapotranspiration. This phenomenon is known as Urban Heat Island (UHI). UHI refers to an increase in air and surface temperatures in urban centers as compared to surrounding suburban and rural areas. Many studies have focused on the UHI effect between rural and urban areas and not many studies are focused on air and surface temperature changes within a city itself. Manhattan is one of United States' most high densely populated city with 27,000 person per Km2 and due to its different elevations and water bodies, the temperature is not uniformly distributed and some areas may heat up more than other. The urban heat island of a city can be subdivided into physically defined neighborhoods that can respond differently to large scale environmental forcing. The urban classification would account for the roughness parameters and surface fluxes and reflect large scale influences with proximity to large body of water or vegetation. To find the biases at the street level in Manhattan, field campaigns of temperature and relative measurements have been formed for the summer of 2012 and 2013.Two types of field campaigns have been done to complete temperature measurements. One is the suite of mobile sensors to measure temperature and relative humidity. The sensors are deployed by foot simultaneously for measuring street level environmental conditions. This measurement is high spatial resolution and it contains data from the hottest part of the day. Another field campaign measurement is done by 10 fixed sensors which were deployed to measure temperature, relative humidity and sunlight. These sensors were installed at selected locations throughout Manhattan for high temporal resolution. The spatial and temporal variability sampled by these two campaigns provide complementary information that can help in predicting environmental variability throughout Manhattan. This project will be the first and most high resolution street level neighborhood study on a metropolitan city. To understand the impact of UHI on Manhattan's land cover, this research will create high resolution neighborhood-scale data sets using three basic approaches; employing fixed stations, walking campaign data, and Landsat satellite data. The main goal of the project is to develop a neighborhood based temperature predictions using large scale measurements with down-scaling techniques for both near term and climate projections, and to anticipate climate adaption and mitigation at the neighborhood scale, preparing the health community for climate induced increases in heat wave frequency/intensity.