Intra-urban microclimate mapping for citizens’ wellbeing: Novel wearable sensing techniques and automatized data-processing

Abstract

Cities alter their-own climate due to their configuration and land surface thermal properties. The main effect is the well-known phenomenon of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) meaning higher temperatures experienced in urbanized environment with respect to rural surroundings. Nevertheless, thermal behavior of cities varies even within the city itself and the investigation of intra-urban microclimate diversification is of extreme importance in detecting the most critical conditions for citizens well-being and real building energy need estimation. This work wants to map the urban microclimate environment by means of a miniaturized and wearable weather station designed by the authors to catch the pedestrian perspective in the outdoors. Collected data are processed in order to erase elapsed-time-dependency of the observations collected through the mobile monitoring system and manual and automated data clustering procedure are compared to assess potential of the proposed automatized procedure in detecting peculiarities of the urban structure. According to results, the system demonstrates to catch the intra-urban microclimate diversification and the proposed data processing procedure gives back reliable results in terms of direct comparison of site specific environmental data and phisical drivers. Finally, the automatized clustering process produces better results for day-time monitoring in compact areas assuming temperature, relative humidity and solar radiation as environmental drivers.