Local Climate Zones for Urban Temperature Studies

TL;DR: The RBIS has a user-friendly interface with full read/write access for the management, linkage, analysis, visualization, and presentation of different types of data in the context of multidisciplinary environmental assessment and planning.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyzed temperature variability within outdoor urban spaces at three scales and found that high-rise building exposure induces various surrounding microclimates, having the shadow projection as main forcing.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors applied the weather research and forecasting model to simulate UHI-induced circulation in the presence of background wind and found that the strong UHIC flow pattern is characterized by upstream back-currents and returned leeside inflows.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors conduct a systematic review to critically assess the advent and development of heat-health action plans (HHAPs) with a special focus on its integration with urban planning policies and show that implementation of core elements of HHAPs varies significantly in the areas of long-term urban planning, real-time surveillance, monitoring and evaluation.

TL;DR: The framework of a national land use and land cover classification system is presented for use with remote sensor data and uses the features of existing widely used classification systems that are amenable to data derived from re-mote sensing sources.

Abstract: In such a framework the field of urban meteorology may be judged to be at an early stage and to be evolving in a rather unbalanced fashion. The literature of the past 150 years is replete with studies of ’urban effects’ carried out at levels 1 and 2. Usually they are concerned with simple description or statistical analysis based upon empirical evidence from a single city. With the exception of a very few notable studies, attention to the processes (i.e. the causes underlying the observed effects) and to physico-mathematical modelling has been restricted to the past decade. Of course it is not expected, nor indeed may it be desirable, that research in a field should progress in a simple manner through the sequence 1-4, but two important points should be evident. First. as time progresses the bulk of research in a field should move to higher levels of enquiry. Second, the predictive power of processresponse models is limited by the extent to which the processes are understood. Some special difficulties have contributed to this unsatisfactory state of the field including : (1) the inherent complexity of the city-atmosphere system. The atmospheric state is a response to exchanges of energy, mass and momentum covering a wide range of space and time scales; in urban areas the sources and sinks for these exchanges are located in an extremely heterogeneous fashion and involve significant anthropogenic as well as natural factors; (2) the lack of clear conceptual/theoretical frameworks for enquiry especially in the light of the complications placed upon conventional theory by (1) ; (3) the expense and difficulty of observation in cities. Commonly one must deal with conditions within a relatively large volume of air (typically lo2 to lo3 km3) containing significant spatial and temporal variability thereby creating sampling problems. Moreover there are restrictions on the use of observation systems (towers, aircraft, balloons, acoustic radar) not normally encountered in uninhabited terrain. Here we will use the example of the urban ‘heat island’ effect to illustrate the state of urban meteorological research. This will include a condensed review of our understanding

TL;DR: A land use and land cover classification system for use with remote sensor data provides a standardized framework for classifying land use and land cover throughout the country.