Evaluation of sustainable strategies and design solutions at high-latitude urban settlements to enhance outdoor thermal comfort

J Brozovsky,S Corio,N Gaitani,A Gustavsen

doi:10.1016/j.enbuild.2021.111037

Abstract

Driven by the necessity to design resilient and prosperous cities and to counteract the impacts of climate change, this study aims to shed light on the interactions between microclimate, urban built environment, and the outdoor thermal comfort (OTC) conditions at a university campus in Trondheim, Norway. This paper calls into question up to which degree four typical microclimatic design solutions can enhance OTC in high-latitude areas which are generally characterized by strong seasonal variability in meteorological conditions, particularly in solar radiation. An on-site measurement campaign in autumn 2019 for the validation of numerical simulations with ENVI-met were carried out. Solar access proved to be the key parameter to improve OTC by a Predicted Mean Vote of up to 1.0 in the investigated climatic situation. Moreover, wind sheltering resulted in an increase of OTC, although not as pronounced and on a smaller spatial scale. Changing the buildings’ surface material resulted in no significant changes in microclimatic conditionsAt a higher wind speed (8 m/s), wind sheltering becomes more effective in improving OTC than solar access. This study underlines the importance of microclimatic assessments in order to understand the effect of different interventions with the urban environment on OTC at high‐latitude urban settlements.

Highlights

Already in the 1830s, it was discovered that a city – London in this case – had a distinctly different climate than its rural surroundings [1]
The Predicted Mean Vote for outdoor conditions (PMVo) values for a typical day in October in the study area were between À2.8 and À1.9, with the highest values occurring in areas where unobstructed solar radiation is available
At Stripa, the average values for air temperature, wind speed, MRT and PMVo were calculated as 6.54 °C, 0.78 m/s, 12.45 °C and À2.72 respectively

Summary

Introduction

Already in the 1830s, it was discovered that a city – London in this case – had a distinctly different climate than its rural surroundings [1]. Driven by the necessity for designing better cities and, especially nowadays, to counteract the observed and projected impacts of climate change and rapidly growing city populations worldwide [2,3], a great number of publications on urban climatology (UC) have been published since . One of the most documented topics in urban climate research is the urban heat island (UHI) effect which describes the observed higher temperatures in urban areas by several degrees compared to the surrounding rural areas [5]. The UHI phenomenon has been reported to occur in urban areas of nearly any size and across all climate zones [6].

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Discussion

Conclusion