CLIMATE CHANGE & URBAN HEAT ISLAND EFFECTS

Climate change has significant influence upon the human life in cities, such as habitability, quality of life etc. Urban modelling typically addresses adverse effects on human life, such as extended heat or air pollution. For example, acquiring knowledge about the development and distribution of heat stress across different parts of an urban area (city centre, residential & business areas, industrial sites, roads/rail, parks etc.) can prove vital for urban planning in regard to climate change, but also for individual every day decisions. 

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Urban Heat Islands (UHIs) arise with the urbanization developments that change the thermal and radiative properties of natural landscapes. Extreme heat poses significant risks to the world´s growing urban population, and the heat stress is likely to escalate with the anthropogenic increased temperatures projected by climate models. Excessive heat, especially in inconvenient combination with humidity and/or air quality, negatively influences not only the human health, but it has an impact on the labour productivity and the urban metabolism as well. Measures to mitigate UHIs can be identified by analysing the source of the problem. Provision of actionable and practicable information, to address challenges of climate change mitigation and adaptation and to involve citizens and decision-makers from the beginning, through user focused City Climate Services (CCS), requires advanced weather models in a combination with data from diverse data sources, as well as a state-of-the art engineering environment for effective development of such

services.

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Therefore, CityCLIM aims at developing an Open Platform and an Advanced Urban Weather Forecasting Tool to run

a high-resolution (100 m x 100 m) meteorological model for diverse cities in Europe, using various sources of input

data, such as, in-situ measurements, airborne and satellite data.

 

The output of the resulting high-resolution information and forecast tool will be used to give near-real-time warnings to the city and its citizens and to produce impact maps of different mitigation scenarios that can be implemented in urban areas.