A historical review of urban climatology and the atmospheres of the industrialized world

Abstract

Although the scientific research in the atmospheres of urban space has been long in existence, it has still not found its proper place in the contemporary historical analysis. The historical emphasis on large‐scale phenomena and the advent of numerical weather prediction has occluded the scientific relevance and social dimension of investigations into small‐scale atmospheric processes. As a result, agricultural, forest, urban, and indoor meteorologies have received relatively little attention to date, as have micro‐climatology, turbulence studies, and the air pollution meteorology. This article provides an outline of the historical and contemporary studies of urban weather and climate in Europe and North America. It looks into the origins of the field, the evolution of main topics of research, and the processes of disciplinary institutionalization. The article suggests that a closer inspection of the developments in urban climatology would permit a more representative account of modern atmospheric sciences and provide a more comprehensive understanding of the contemporary concerns over the anthropogenic climate change. WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:539–553. doi: 10.1002/wcc.244 This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary Perspectives

Urban Cold and Heat Island in the City of Bragança (Portugal)

“…As over half of the global population lives nowadays in urban environments [1], the changes in land use and land cover, from rural to urban, induced modifications in physical processes which generate the urban climate, described by Oke [2] as the particular meteorological processes and atmospheric changes that take place at the urban level. Many urban patterns can influence the local climate, including the distribution of land use, the design of streets, buildings and open spaces, as well as the choice of materials; such urban design options generate local changes in wind speed and direction, humidity, precipitation, air temperature, air pollutants dispersion and deposition [3,4].…”

Controlled environments: An urban research agenda on microclimatic enclosure

“…Urban governments and their stakeholders' ability to manage and minimise the implications of economic and ecological turbulence in the more uncertain 'urbanatura' (Luke, 2009) become increasingly important in the capacity to guarantee urban reproduction (Hodson and Marvin, 2009). Concern for ecological flows extends from the metabolic resources (food, energy, water) that service cities and remove wastes, but also extends to the development of a new understanding of the atmospheric conditions that shape urban life (Jankovic´, 2013;Whitehead, 2011). Whether the context is too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, etc.…”

Contributions and perspectives from geography to the study of climate

“…68 Other research including by Terjung further developed the understanding of the energy urban balance of cities and the comfort for inhabitants in these spaces. 68 Later, geographers like Tim Oke established the importance of understanding chemistry and physics as part of studies of air pollution. Oke was central to establishing how the urban boundary layer worked, 68 the topic of his well-known and well used textbook Boundary Layer Climates.…”

“…The field of urban climatology is especially important for any review of the applied work of geographers, and because it is a subject more extensively reviewed elsewhere, [67][68][69] I will only briefly review the key components here. Albert Kratzer published a landmark review in 1937 Stadtklima which assembled the preexisting literature into a synthesis that became valued internationally, particularly after its publication in English in 1956 68 ; from Luke Howard's work on the climate of London through the extensive German research that looked to an urban climatology to aid urban planning, these were frequently conducted through a descriptive physical geography of the climate of particular places. For grand theories of atmospheric processes, urban climates had less to commend them as they were significantly humanly modified, but geographers (along with meteorologists) helped establish the importance of research that would aim to understand and manage climates at human scales, particularly the climates of the towns and cities.…”