An urban climate service to manage heat risks in UK and Chinese cities 

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Ramsey ◽  
Claire Scannell
Keyword(s):  
Urban Climate ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Extreme Heat ◽  
Climate Services ◽  
Extreme Heat Events ◽  
Climate Service ◽  
Urban Heat ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Heat Hazard ◽  
The City

<p>Recent extreme heat events in the UK are likely to become more frequent over the 21st Century and exacerbated in cities due to the urban heat island effect. Due to high population densities and a concentration of assets, urban areas are more vulnerable to climatic extremes with impacts that traverse health, infrastructure, built environment and economic activity. Risks to health, well-being and productivity from high temperatures is one of six priority areas from in UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (2017) where more action is needed to manage risks, prompting local authorities to understand heat risks within their city. <br>City based climate services are needed for day-to-day operations in cities, emergency response and to inform urban design and development.  Recent advances in high resolution modelling enable better representation of urban processes and provide greater understanding of extreme events.  By exploiting such advances in underpinning science, the Met Office is generating urban climate services for city stakeholders to plan for and manage heat stress in their city.<br>The Met Office has been engaging with local authorities and city stakeholders in the UK and China to co-produce a prototype, two tier, urban heat climate service to enhance the resilience of urban environments to extreme heat events.  The prototype is based on a strong requirement from several cities to develop an evidence base of the heat hazard and understand current and future hot spots vulnerable to extremes of heat within the city.  Tier 1 uses observations and high-resolution climate data to provide city specific information of the heat hazard in a graphical factsheet format.  This includes information on future changes in temperature, extreme heat indicators, frequency and duration of heatwave events, and spatial distribution of heat across the city.  Tier 2 involves working closely with city stakeholders to combine the hazard information with data on health, built environment and socio-economics, to provide tailored information on heat exposure and vulnerability.  This will allow users to identify highly vulnerable parts of the city network and neighbourhoods for priority action.  This two-tier service can provide an evidence base to inform urban policy, design and adaptation strategies, and prepare authorities and city stakeholders for future demand on city services. </p>

The City Pack - the co-production of an urban climate service providing local summaries of a city's future climate 

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Fuller ◽  
Claire Scannell ◽  
Victoria Ramsey ◽  
Rebecca Parfitt ◽  
Nicola Golding
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
City Council ◽  
Future Climate ◽  
Future Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Scenarios ◽  
Climate Services ◽  
The Future ◽  
Climate Service ◽  
The City

<p>In 2018, the UN estimated that around 55% of the world’s population currently live within urban areas, with this value projected to rise to 60% by 2030 (United Nations, 2018). High levels of urbanisation, coupled with an increasing trend in extreme weather under future climate change scenarios, combine to create significant challenges to increasing urban resilience for the future (Masson et al., 2020).</p><p>Urban climate services provide tools to support decision making at a range of scales across the city, from day-to-day operations to informing urban design over longer timescales (Grimmond et al., 2015). Whilst urban climate services may be developed at a range of scales (Grimmond et al., 2020), this presentation looks at a prototype climate service which provides long-term climate change projections at the city-specific scale. The ‘City Pack’ was developed through a process of co-production, in which project development aims to move away from a one-way push of scientific information, to a two-way collaborative process of knowledge construction and sharing (Vincent et al., 2019).</p><p>This ‘City Pack’ service was co-developed by the Met Office and Bristol City Council following an assessment of the Council’s climate information needs. The City Pack comprises of three non-technical factsheets which explain how the climate of Bristol has changed and will continue to change into the 21<sup>st</sup> Century based on the UKCP climate projections. The City Pack’s primary aims are to raise awareness of how a cities climate may change in the future and to inform the development of city resilience whilst also providing a tool to be used by city stakeholders to raise awareness of climate change across the council. The audience for the City Pack therefore includes city officials, city planners and the general public. The Bristol City Pack has since provided an evidence base for the Bristol City Council Climate Change Risk Assessment and informed Bristol’s Climate Strategy. In addition, the City Pack has been used to engage with the council’s wider stakeholders and also as a communication and training tool. As such, whilst the co-production of a climate service may be time and resource intensive, the process may also be rewarded with the production of a highly tailored and user-relevant tool.</p><p>Following the success of the prototype ‘City Pack’ service for Bristol City Council, the Met Office are continuing to produce City Packs for additional cities across the UK, and also in China. The project is seeking to ascertain if services which are co-produced with and bespoke to one set of stakeholders, may provide an equally valuable service for other cities and if so, how can we make these services scalable.</p>

scholarly journals Nature-Based Designs to Mitigate Urban Heat: The Efficacy of Green Infrastructure Treatments in Portland, Oregon

Atmosphere ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasuyo Makido ◽  
Dana Hellman ◽  
Vivek Shandas
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Climate Adaptation ◽  
Environmental Concern ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
Extreme Heat ◽  
Land Uses ◽  
Ambient Temperatures ◽  
Urban Heat ◽  
The City

Urban heat is a growing environmental concern in cities around the world. The urban heat island effect, combined with warming effects of climate change, is likely to cause an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events. Alterations to the physical, built environment are a viable option for mitigating urban heat, yet few studies provide systematic guidance to practitioners for adapting diverse land uses. In this study, we examine the use of green infrastructure treatments to evaluate changes in ambient temperatures across diverse land uses in the city of Portland, Oregon. We apply ENVI-met® microclimate modeling at the city-block scale specifically to determine what built environment characteristics are most associated with high temperatures, and the extent to which different physical designs reduce ambient temperature. The analysis included six green infrastructure interventions modeled across six different land-use types, and indicated the varying degrees to which approaches are effective. Results were inconsistent across landscapes, and showed that one mitigation solution alone would not significantly reduce extreme heat. These results can be used to develop targeted, climate- and landscape-specific cooling interventions for different land uses, which can help to inform and refine current guidance to achieve urban climate adaptation goals.

Climate Bubbles: Games to Monitor Urban Climate

Leonardo ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-65
Author(s):  
Drew Hemment ◽  
Carlo Buontempo ◽  
Alfie Dennen
Keyword(s):  
Urban Heat Island ◽  
Air Flow ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
Heat Island ◽  
Local Climate ◽  
Flow Circulation ◽  
Urban Heat ◽  
The City

Climate Bubbles was a playful, participatory mass observation project on local climate. Bubble blowing games were devised to enable people across the city of Manchester to test air flow circulation and, by sharing the results online, enabled the Met Office to create a snapshot of the effect the Urban Heat Island has on wind.

scholarly journals Features of the formation of urban heat islands effects in tropical climates and their impact on the ecology of the city

2019 ◽  
Vol 91 ◽  
pp. 05005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minh Tuan Le ◽  
Nguyen Anh Quan Tran
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Building Materials ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Urban Heat Islands ◽  
Heat Islands ◽  
Urban Heat ◽  
Tropical Climates ◽  
The City

The cumulative heating in some urban areas due to the urban growth and its types of industry, energy and transport, is the effect of urban heat island (UHI). It is recognized as one of the characteristics of the urban climate. The temperature increase caused by the effect (UHI) affects the energy flow in urban ecological systems, creates an unusual urban climate. By studying the effects of climate factors, local building materials to optimize energy efficiency, urban landscape, UHI phenomenon could be significantly moderated.

scholarly journals A historical approach to understanding governance of extreme urban heat in Fukuoka, Japan

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Mabon
Keyword(s):  
Urban Climate ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Extreme Heat ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Environmental Evaluation ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Success Stories ◽  
Not For Profit ◽  
Science Policy Interface ◽  
Urban Heat

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contribute to emergent understandings in research into urban climate change-related disasters (such as extreme heat), which recognise that present-day actions or failures of cities to address climate risk are rooted in a historical context.Design/methodology/approachThe paper analyses content of scientific journals produced by the not-for-profit Kyushu Environmental Evaluation Association in Fukuoka since the 1970s. The aim is to evaluate the shifting understanding and conception of a liveable urban environment within Fukuoka over time and assess how this narrative has informed capability to understand and manage extreme heat as an emergent disaster risk.FindingsThe strong technical competences enabling Fukuoka to undertake evidence-based management of risks from climate-related disasters today exist at least partially because of earlier environmental concerns within the city and an early emergence of techno-scientific competence within the city's research institutions working at the science–policy interface.Originality/valueThe findings suggest a need to avoid uncritically exporting “lessons” from apparent urban climate “success stories”, without full recognition of the historical context enabling production and utilisation of weather and climate knowledge in specific locations.

scholarly journals Lisbon Urban Heat Island Updated: New Highlights about the Relationships between Thermal Patterns and Wind Regimes

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
António Lopes ◽  
Elis Alves ◽  
Maria João Alcoforado ◽  
Raquel Machete
Keyword(s):  
Urban Heat Island ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Heat Island ◽  
Local Wind ◽  
Urban Heat ◽  
Thermal Patterns ◽  
Wind Regimes ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Urban growth implies significant modifications in the urban climate. To understand the influence of the city of Lisbon on the urban boundary layer, a mesoscale meteorological network was installed in 2004. The main goals of the present study are to update the results of the research published in 2007 and to bring more precise information about the relationship between the Urban Heat Island (UHI) and the regional and local wind systems. The highest frequencies of the UHI were found in the city centre (Restauradores). In the green park of Monsanto, the highest frequency occurred between −2 and 0°C. During the summer, the effect of the breezes was observed in Belém, lowering the temperature. The “strong” UHI (intensity >4°C) occurred more often during the summer, with median values of 2°C by night and 1.8°C by day. The highest frequencies of UHI occurred for winds between 2 and 6 m/s and were not associated with atmospheric calm, as pointed out in the literature. Winds above 8 m/s inhibit the occurrence of strong UHI in Lisbon. Summer nighttime strong UHI should be further investigated, due to the heat stress consequences on the population and probable increase of energy consumption.

Forecasting the New York City Urban Heat Island and Sea Breeze during Extreme Heat Events

2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 1460-1477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talmor Meir ◽  
Philip M. Orton ◽  
Julie Pullen ◽  
Teddy Holt ◽  
William T. Thompson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Urban Heat Island ◽  
York City ◽  
Sea Breeze ◽  
Extreme Heat ◽  
Heat Island ◽  
Extreme Heat Events ◽  
Urban Heat ◽  
Heat Events

Abstract Two extreme heat events impacting the New York City (NYC), New York, metropolitan region during 7–10 June and 21–24 July 2011 are examined in detail using a combination of models and observations. The U.S. Navy's Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS) produces real-time forecasts across the region on a 1-km resolution grid and employs an urban canopy parameterization to account for the influence of the city on the atmosphere. Forecasts from the National Weather Service's 12-km resolution North American Mesoscale (NAM) implementation of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model are also examined. The accuracy of the forecasts is evaluated using a land- and coastline-based observation network. Observed temperatures reached 39°C or more at central urban sites over several days and remained high overnight due to urban heat island (UHI) effects, with a typical nighttime urban–rural temperature difference of 4°–5°C. Examining model performance broadly over both heat events and 27 sites, COAMPS has temperature RMS errors averaging 1.9°C, while NAM has RMSEs of 2.5°C. COAMPS high-resolution wind and temperature predictions captured key features of the observations. For example, during the early summer June heat event, the Long Island south shore coastline experienced a more pronounced sea breeze than was observed for the July heat wave.

scholarly journals Analysis of the urban heat island in representative points of the city of Bayeux / PB

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 345
Author(s):  
Amanda Mayara Paulino Da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Urban Heat Island ◽  
Thermal Field ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
Urban Heat Islands ◽  
Heat Island ◽  
Thermal Discomfort ◽  
Heat Islands ◽  
Urban Heat ◽  
The City

Abstrat Urban growth has generated several socio-environmental problems and has altered the quality of life of people living in these environments. Due to the disorderly growth of cities and the various forms of urban land use and occupation, changes in the thermal field of these areas have occurred and caused the formation of urban heat islands and thermal discomfort in urban environments. Thus, the need to understand the formation of heat islands in these areas and the study of their causes and consequences grows. Given this context, the present work intends to study the urban climate of the city of Bayeux / PB, specifically the urban thermal field, and the formation of heat islands. For the accomplishment of the research, initially a bibliographical survey of the subject in question was made. Subsequently experimental points of meteorological data collection (temperature and relative air humidity) were defined in the metropolitan area of the city of João Pessoa, specifically in the municipality of Bayeux / PB. These points were defined based on the different types of land use and cover in the study area. The following experimental points were defined: a point in the center of the city of Bayeux / PB, another point on the banks of the BR230 direction Bayeux, and a reference point in a remnant of Atlantic forest. To obtain the urban heat island the reference point was used as a parameter of the climatic conditions of a natural environment. The data of temperature and relative humidity were collected through thermometers (HOBO U-10), which were placed on steel tripods (1.5 meters high) and monitored at uninterrupted intervals of 1 and 1 hour during the dry period and rainy region. The analysis of the data points to the formation of urban heat islands in the two periods evaluated in the city of Bayeux / PB, being the center of the city, the most critical area with the most intense heat islands. The vegetative cover played a predominant role in the climatic mitigation of the experimental samples as well as the presence of precipitation. The areas with impermeable soil cover presented the largest heat islands and contributed to the thermal discomfort of the study area. Keywords: Urban Climate, Thermodynamic Field, Urban Heat Island.

scholarly journals Ilhas de calor urbano em cidade do semiárido nordestino

GeoTextos ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana Maria Oliveira Silva ◽  
Marcelo De Oliveira Moura ◽  
Vinicius Ferreira Luna
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Air Temperature ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
Temperature Data ◽  
Urban Heat Islands ◽  
Heat Island ◽  
Heat Islands ◽  
Intensity Category ◽  
Urban Heat ◽  
The City

<p>A pesquisa pautou-se nas concepções do Sistema Clima Urbano de Monteiro (1976) e procurou identificar e mapear as ilhas de calor urbano na cidade do Crato-CE, em dois períodos sazonais do ano. Para isso, foram selecionados 10 pontos experimentais distribuídos em bairros na zona urbana da cidade, e aferiram-se dados de temperatura do ar com termohigrômetros instalados em abrigos meteorológicos durante os meses de abril (mês chuvoso) e outubro (mês seco). A partir da coleta de dados, a categoria predominante de intensidade das Ilhas de Calor intra e interurbana para a cidade do Crato foi o de ‘Média magnitude’. O horário que ocorre a maior intensidade da ilha de calor é pela tarde, 14h, com valores superiores a 5ºC de diferença de um local para o outro. Os bairros mais densamente ocupados e com baixa cobertura vegetal apresentaram os maiores valores de temperatura, enquanto que, nos que se localizam mais próximos da encosta da chapada e com vegetação mais densa, ocorreram as temperaturas mais amenas.</p><p>Abstract</p><p>URBAN HEAT ISLANDS IN CITY OF THE NORTHEAST SEMIARID</p><p>The research was based on the conceptions of the Monteiro Urban Climate System (1976) and sought to identify and map the urban heat islands in the city of Crato/ Ce in two seasonal periods of the year. For this, 10 experimental points were selected and distributed in neighborhoods in the urban area of the city and air temperature data was measured with thermohygrometers installed in meteorological shelters during the months of April (rainy month) and October (dry month). From the data collection, the predominant intensity category of the intra and interurban Heat Islands for the city of Crato was that of ‘Medium magnitude’. The time that occurs the greatest intensity of the heat island is in the afternoon, 14h, with values above 5ºC of difference from one place to another. The most densely occupied neighborhoods and with low vegetation cover had the highest temperature values, while those located closer to the slope of the plateau and with more dense vegetation, the milder temperatures occurred.</p>

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