Intra-urban microclimate investigation in urban heat island through a novel mobile monitoring system

Abstract

Monitoring microclimate variables within cities with high accuracy is an ongoing challenge for a better urban resilience to climate change. Assessing the intra-urban characteristics of a city is of vital importance for ensuring fine living standards for citizens. Here, a novel mobile microclimate station is applied for monitoring the main microclimatic variables regulating urban and intra-urban environment, as well as directionally monitoring shortwave radiation and illuminance and hence systematically map for the first time the effect of urban surfaces and anthropogenic heat. We performed day-time and night-time monitoring campaigns within a historical city in Italy, characterized by substantial urban structure differentiations. We found significant intra-urban variations concerning variables such as air temperature and shortwave radiation. Moreover, the proposed experimental framework may capture, for the very first time, significant directional variations with respect to shortwave radiation and illuminance across the city at microclimate scale. The presented mobile station represents therefore the key missing piece for exhaustively identifying urban environmental quality, anthropogenic actions, and data driven modelling toward risk and resilience planning. It can be therefore used in combination with satellite data, stable weather station or other mobile stations, e.g. wearable sensing techniques, through a citizens’ science approach in smart, livable, and sustainable cities in the near future.

Unrelented heat: international trends and impacts on human health in 15 selected cities

“…LCZs represent a uniform surface cover, structure, material, and human activity that span hundreds of meters to several kilometers in horizontal scale, and each LCZ has a characteristic temperature regime that is most apparent over dry surfaces, on calm, clear nights, and in areas of simple relief in cities and their surroundings. Based on the existing LCZs classi cation system and UMNs, the intra-urban assessments of cities is important for ensuring better public health and well-being and urban environment by obtaining more detailed atmospheric conditions between different urbanization types (Kousis et al 2021).…”

Fixed and Mobile Low-Cost Sensing Approaches for Microclimate Monitoring in Urban Areas: A Preliminary Study in the City of Bolzano (Italy)

“…Microclimate conditions vary among different areas within the same city, as they are influenced by the unique conditions of each location, such as the distribution and density of the buildings, the materials characterizing their surfaces, and the presence of vegetation [20,21]. Therefore, the quantification of the magnitude of micro-climate parameters needs to take into account the influence of urban morphology and the related spatial-temporal variations [22]. The access to spatial data at the proper resolution is crucial to correctly represent the distribution of morphological and environmental features, and so to characterize the urban microclimate conditions [23].…”

“…In this context, the acquisition of climate data in urban areas through distributed networks of sensors has already been proven to be a valuable approach, as reported by many studies in the literature [22,24,25]. Microclimate studies in urban areas, which involve the on-site collection of parameters such as air temperature (T air ) and relative humidity (RH), can be divided in two major groups: fixed and mobile monitoring.…”

“…Dense sensor networks have high operational and maintenance costs [24]. Consequently, fixed sensor networks usually offer a limited spatial resolution [22]. To overcome these limitations, approaches in which the sensors are installed on vehicles moving through the city on pre-defined routes are becoming popular [29][30][31][32].…”

“…However, data acquired by mobile systems not only have a spatial dependency, but also a temporal dependency, as different zones are crossed at different times. Hence, there is a need for a data pre-processing stage before the comparison of the collected time series in different areas [22]. To best benefit from the advantages of both approaches, previous studies have proposed the combination of fixed and mobile measurements [33].…”