Advancement of Urban Heat Island Studies

A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Meteorology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2022) | Viewed by 13999

Special Issue Editors

Department of Meteorology and Climatology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow 119991, Russian
Interests: urban climate; urban heat island; acoustic remote sensing of the atmosphere; SODAR; meteorological conditions of the air pollution; early meteorological data
Department of Meteorology and Climatology, Faculty of Geography, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow 119991, Russian
Interests: urban heat island; urban climate; the influence of meteorological conditions on the spread of pollutants
Architecture and Built Environment, University of Northumbria, Newcastle NE1 8ST, UK
Interests: bioinspiration; heat transfer; energy efficiency; simulations; sustainability; built environment
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This special issue will be devoted to the urban meteorology as an important and contemporary scientific direction. As is known urban areas in the World totally represent only ~2% from the Earth surface but the urban population exceeds already 55% out from the Earth population. A phenomenon of the ‘Urban Heat Island’ (UHI) was discovered for the first time at the beginning of the 19th century in London and, since that time, it was studied at almost all big cities around the World. Moreover, some more detailed effects such as local ‘cool islands’ at urban forests were also investigated at a lot of cities. Nevertheless, the available accumulated data about UHI are still insufficient due to diversity of geographical conditions and quick change of global climate. Thus, this special issue represents an actual topic.

Usually stationary data of weather stations are used for studying of long-term dynamics of UHI with great statistical significance. Mobile experiments using sensors installed at trains, cars, bicycles, etc., as well as temporary increased station networks are usually episodic and short in time but their results are more detailed and allow studying of the UHI spatial fine-structure. One more way is use of satellite data about so-called ‘Surface Urban Heat Islands’ (SUHI) which are both regular and detailed.

In conditions of global warming the important application of the urban meteorology is a mitigation of the UHI thermal effect, especially during heat-waves. In hot climates UHI is negative phenomenon which increases thermal stress for people. On the contrary, at high latitudes (e.g., in Arctic) UHI is rather positive phenomenon which prevents urban population from extremely strong frosts and reduces the urban heating cost.

Besides air temperature, cities usually influence on the spatial fields of other parameters such as humidity, precipitation, wind velocity, solar radiation, concentrations of minor air gases and aerosol particles, and so on. Thus, specific phenomena like ‘Urban Dry Island’, ‘Urban Pollution Island’ and others are important objects of studying as well. Atmosphere Journal cordially invites all specialists to prepare their papers for this issue.

Dr. Mikhail Lokoshchenko
Dr. Lyubov Alekseeva
Dr. Kishor Zingre
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • urban meteorology
  • urban heat island
  • urban dry island
  • surface urban heat island
  • mitigation
  • landscaping
  • local cool island
  • stationary data
  • mobile platform
  • satellite data
  • radiometric measurements
  • air pollution
  • climate change

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 2093 KiB  
Article
Influence of Meteorological Parameters on the Urban Heat Island in Moscow
by Mikhail A. Lokoshchenko and Lyubov I. Alekseeva
Atmosphere 2023, 14(3), 507; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/atmos14030507 - 06 Mar 2023
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1424
Abstract
The urban heat island (UHI) intensity in Moscow and the influence of various meteorological parameters are discussed using weather station data. The maximal and average in-space UHI intensities, i.e., a comparison of air temperature T either in the city centre or in the [...] Read more.
The urban heat island (UHI) intensity in Moscow and the influence of various meteorological parameters are discussed using weather station data. The maximal and average in-space UHI intensities, i.e., a comparison of air temperature T either in the city centre or in the whole urban area together with rural zone have averaged 1.9 and 0.9 °C, respectively, in recent years. The UHI in Moscow has stabilized over the past decade and is not growing. Under conditions of a strong anticyclone, the maximal UHI intensity in space and time reaches 11–12 °C. Low cloudiness and amplitudes of diurnal air temperature, as well as surface temperature, demonstrate the closest relationship with the UHI intensity among other parameters with the correlation coefficient of up to −0.67 for low cloudiness and the maximal UHI intensity. The effect of wind speed, total cloudiness and relative humidity on the UHI is slightly weaker, but still significant. The relationships of all meteorological parameters with the maximal UHI intensity are closer than those with the average one. The multiple correlation coefficient between the maximal UHI intensity and both parameters (low cloudiness and average daily wind speed) is 0.76–0.82. The UHI intensity function of air temperature has a minimum in the range from −4 to 0 °C; its growth both at lower and higher T is due to the influence of anticyclonic weather. The UHI intensity function of wind speed decreases with wind strength. The threshold value at which this function asymptotically approaches its lower limit is 10 m/s in the 40–200 m air layer. The UHI intensity functions of both total and low cloudiness decrease with increasing cloudiness and the differences between them are significant if the cloud cover is more than 50%. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advancement of Urban Heat Island Studies)
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17 pages, 2497 KiB  
Article
Accessing the Heat Exposure Risk in Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Region Based on Heat Island Footprint Analysis
by Xuecheng Fu, Lei Yao and Shuo Sun
Atmosphere 2022, 13(5), 739; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/atmos13050739 - 05 May 2022
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 1653
Abstract
The urbanization process leads to the enhancement of the urban heat island (UHI) effect, and the high temperature brought by it exacerbates the risk of heat exposure and seriously endangers human health. Analyzing the spatiotemporal characteristics and levels of heat exposure risk is [...] Read more.
The urbanization process leads to the enhancement of the urban heat island (UHI) effect, and the high temperature brought by it exacerbates the risk of heat exposure and seriously endangers human health. Analyzing the spatiotemporal characteristics and levels of heat exposure risk is important for formulating heat risk prevention and control measures. Therefore, this study analyzes the spatiotemporal characteristics of heat exposure risk based on the UHI footprint (FP) and explores the relationship between it and urbanization factors in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei (BTH) region from 2000 to 2020, and obtains the following conclusions: (1) The BTH region suffers from severe UHI problems, with FP ranging from 6.05 km (Chengde) to 32.51 km (Beijing), and the majority of cities show significant trends of FP increase. (2) With the increase in FP, massive populations are exposed within the heat risk areas, with the average annual population at risk across cities ranging from 269,826 (Chengde) to 166,020,390 (Beijing), with a predominance of people exposed to high risk (more than 65% of the total) and generally showing increasing trends. (3) The population at risk of heat exposure is significantly correlated with urbanization factors, indicating that urbanization is an important reason for the increase in the risk population and the enhancement of the risk level. These results suggest that with the continuous urbanization process, the heat exposure risk problem faced by cities in the BTH region will persist and gradually worsen, which must be paid attention to and effective mitigation measures must be taken. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advancement of Urban Heat Island Studies)
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21 pages, 12294 KiB  
Article
Comparison between Air Temperature and Land Surface Temperature for the City of São Paulo, Brazil
by Augusto Cezar Lima do Nascimento, Emerson Galvani, João Paulo Assis Gobo and Cássio Arthur Wollmann
Atmosphere 2022, 13(3), 491; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/atmos13030491 - 18 Mar 2022
Cited by 21 | Viewed by 7492
Abstract
This study aims to identify the relationship between changes in temperature regarding urbanization processes and seasonality in the city of São Paulo, located in the Tropic of Capricorn. The land surface temperature (LST) results were compared to official weather stations measurements, identifying in [...] Read more.
This study aims to identify the relationship between changes in temperature regarding urbanization processes and seasonality in the city of São Paulo, located in the Tropic of Capricorn. The land surface temperature (LST) results were compared to official weather stations measurements, identifying in the spring–summer period 65.5% to 86.2% accuracy, while in the autumn–winter period, the results ranged from 58.6% to 93.1% accuracy, when considering the standard deviation and the temperature probe error. The mean MAE and mean RMSE range from 1.2 to 1.9 °C, with 83.0% of the values being ≤2.7 °C, and the coefficient of determination values are R = 0.81 in spring–summer and R = 0.82 in autumn–winter. Great thermal amplitude was estimated in the spring–summer season, with a difference in LST of the built-up space and rural area ranging from 5.8 and 11.5 °C, while in the autumn–winter season, the LST is more distributed through the city, with differences ranging from 4.4 to 8.5 °C. In addition, the current study suggests remote sensing as a reliable, cheap, and practical methodology to assist climate in order to support public policies and decision-making actions regarding environmental and urban planning. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advancement of Urban Heat Island Studies)
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18 pages, 2274 KiB  
Article
The Energy Model of Urban Heat Island
by Nina V. Dudorova and Boris D. Belan
Atmosphere 2022, 13(3), 457; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/atmos13030457 - 11 Mar 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2581
Abstract
Despite the fact that the presence of a heat island over a city was established quite a long time ago, now there is no versatile algorithm for the determination of the urban heat island intensity. The proposed models either take into account only [...] Read more.
Despite the fact that the presence of a heat island over a city was established quite a long time ago, now there is no versatile algorithm for the determination of the urban heat island intensity. The proposed models either take into account only one or several factors for the formation of an urban heat island or do not consider physical reasons for the difference in thermodynamic conditions between a city and countryside. In this regard, it is impossible to make a forecast and determine the optimal methods for reducing the urban heat island intensity for an arbitrarily chosen city in a wide range of its characteristics and climatic conditions. This paper studies the causes for the formation of an urban heat island in order to develop the quantitative model of this process through the determination of the difference in radiation fluxes of various nature between a city and countryside (background area). A new equation allowing the intensity of an urban heat island in different seasons and different times of day, as well as under various atmospheric conditions, to be calculated from meteorological parameters measured at a stationary observation station is proposed. The model has been tested through the comparison of the results of numerical simulation with direct measurements of the heat island in Tomsk with a mobile station. It is shown that the main contributors to the formation of the heat island in Tomsk are anthropogenic heat emissions (80–90% in winter, 40–50% in summer) and absorption of shortwave radiation by the urban underlying surface (5–15% in winter, 40–50% summer). The absorption of longwave radiation by the urban underlying surface, absorption by atmospheric water vapor and other constituents, and heat consumption for evaporation are insignificant. An increase in the turbulent heat flux is responsible for the outflow of 40–50% of absorbed energy in summer and 20–30% in winter. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advancement of Urban Heat Island Studies)
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