An anthropogenic heating database for major U.S. cities

Anthropogenic heating is an important but often ignored component of the urban energy budget, with potentially significant ramifications for modeling urban climate and air quality. Diurnal profiles of anthropogenic heating are not commonly available, however, making it difficult to account for anthropogenic heat release in analyses of the urban environment. To address the growing need for such profiles we have applied a published top-down methodology to develop representative season-specific anthropogenic heating profiles for more than 50 US cities. The method is “top-down” in that it uses suitably downscaled coarse spatial and temporal resolution data to estimate diurnal profiles for cities. These data have been obtained from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (US Department of Transportation), the Energy Information Administration (US Department of Energy), the National Climatic Data Center (US Department of Commerce), and the Urban Transportation Planning Package (US Census). For each urban area we have calculated diurnal profiles for two spatial scales - city scale, and greater metropolitan area. Details of all profiles will be made available on our website (www.fuse.pdx.edu). For presentation purposes, however, we will include a table summarizing profile parameters for periodic approximations of each profile. In addition to presenting the general methodology and summary results we will compare profiles for cities from various climatic regions. We will also discuss the importance of spatial and temporal scales of analysis and demonstrate the role that analysis scale plays in affecting the magnitude of the resulting profiles.