Surface thermal analysis of North Brabant cities and neighbourhoods during heat waves

The urban heat island effect is often associated with large metropolises. However, in the Netherlands even small cities will be affected by the phenomenon in the future (Hove et al., 2011), due to the dispersed or mosaic urbanisation patterns in particularly the southern part of the country: the province of North Brabant. This study analyses the...

Using satellite imagery analysis to classify and redesign provincial parks for a better cooling effect on cities: The case study of South Holland

The purpose of this research is to analyse the thermal behaviour of South Holland provincial parks during heat waves, in order to provide design adaptation guidelines to increase their cooling capacity over the hotspots present in their urban surroundings. This research analyses the thermal behaviour of different land use patches (forests,...

Hotterdam: Mapping the social, morphological, and land-use dimensions of the Rotterdam urban heat island

Climate scientists forecast that heat waves will occur more often in the Netherlands in the coming decades. The Hotterdam study accordingly measured urban heat and modelled the surface energy balance in the Dutch city of Rotterdam. It identified in detail the city’s social, morphological, and land-use dimensions using a geographic information...

Uchimizu: A Cool(ing) Tradition to Locally Decrease Air Temperature

The urban heat island effect was first described 200 years ago, but the development of ways to mitigate heat in urban areas reaches much further into the past. Uchimizu is a 17th century Japanese tradition, in which water is sprinkled around houses to cool the ground surface and air by evaporation. Unfortunately, the number of published studies...

Water as a coolant of cities

Since more than half of the world population already lives in cities, it is important to understand the urban climate and its particularities. One of the typical aspects of urban areas is that cities are generally warmer than their rural surrounding. This phenomenon was first time described 200 years ago in the case of London and is commonly...

On the daytime micro-climatic conditions inside an idealized 2D urban canyon

This study investigated the surface temperature, air temperature and mean radiant temperature inside an idealized 2D street geometry during daytime. The goal was to unravel the relative impact of radiative transfer, heat conduction and ventilation to the urban heat budget. A building-resolving simulation model has been used, which represents...

Cool Tree Architecture: A Descriptive Framework for a Tree Architecture Typology to Temper Urban Microclimates

As the elementary unit of the urban forest, trees temper thermal extremes in urban microclimates through shading and evapotranspiration, and by altering the movement of air. Metrics on shade performances of different species, however, are currently limited, which can be remedied by the development of a method to describe the range of species and...