Summer thermal comfort in Czech cities: measured effects of blue and green features in city centres
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SPECIAL ISSUE: 1ST EUROPEAN BIOMETEOROLOGISTS
Summer thermal comfort in Czech cities: measured effects of blue and green features in city centres Michal Lehnert 1
&
Vladimír Tokar 1
&
Martin Jurek 1
&
Jan Geletič 2,3
Received: 31 March 2020 / Revised: 11 August 2020 / Accepted: 27 August 2020 # ISB 2020
Abstract This study consists of nine case studies addressing thermal comfort in the public areas of city centres, with particular emphasis on the measurable effects of blue and green infrastructure on thermal exposure. Daytime on-site measurements were taken in summer in the paved areas of squares, in the proximity of water fountains, and in the shade of trees in order to evaluate levels of heat stress based on the universal thermal climate index (UTCI). The differences in UTCI values between the research points confirm substantial cooling associated with high vegetation (trees induced differences up to 10.5 °C in UTCI), while the measurable cooling effect of low vegetation was negligible (not more than 2.3 °C UTCI). It was also quite low around water fountains, spray fountains, and misting systems. It follows that municipal authorities should consider the differences in cooling effect potential of individual types of blue and green infrastructure when incorporating climate adaptation measures into urban planning. Keywords Thermal comfort . Heat stress . UTCI . Blue and green infrastructure
Introduction Increasing heat in urban areas during the summer period ranks among the major climate challenges for Central European cities (Kovács and Németh 2012; Geletič et al. 2019). Extremely high temperature in urban areas has a negative impact on the habitability of public spaces and on the development of city centres (Cohen et al. 2013), on the environment (Čeplová et al. 2017; Lakatos and Gulyás 2003) and on the health of the population (Patz et al. 2005; Haines et al. 2006; Ebi 2011), and above all, they increase mortality rates (Kyselý and Huth 2004; Kovats and Hajat 2008; Zanobetti et al. 2012; Arsenović et al. 2019a). Appropriate heat mitigation measures are therefore an important issue in modern urban planning (Rosenzweig et al. 2018; Luca 2017). * Martin Jurek [email protected] 1
Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, Palacký University Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic
2
Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno, Czech Republic
3
Department of Complex Systems, Institute of Computer Science of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
Several studies have reported that heat in urban areas may be substantially reduced by appropriate heat mitigation/ climate change adaptation measures (Nikolopoulou et al. 1999; Rizwan et al. 2008; Mahdavi et al. 2014). It is worth noting that most urban climate research studies focus closely on air temperature related to the urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon (Stewart 2019). Nevertheless, radiation (quantified as mean radiant temperature), in particular, as well as humidity and air velocity, is essential to appropriate a
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