Weather in the Hungarian Lowland from the Point of View of Humans

Ferenc Ács,Lara Amanda Marques Vieira,Bertold Kelemen,Annamária Zsákai,Zita Szabó,Erzsébet Kristóf

doi:10.3390/atmos12010084

Ferenc Ács, Lara Amanda Marques Vieira + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12010084

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Abstract

Weather at different locations in the Hungarian lowland in different seasons (winter, summer) and times of day (morning, noon) is investigated from the human biometeorological point of view. Human thermal load characteristics of weather are described in terms of clothing resistance and operative temperature. Individual human thermal load–thermal sensation relationships have been estimated to study weather variation in the cities of Sopron (cooler part of Hungary) and Szeged (warmer part of Hungary). In the clothing resistance model, the humans are walking at a speed of 1.1 ms−1 in outdoor conditions without sweating. The main findings are as follows. (1) In the early summer mornings, the weather is sensed as “neutral” or “cool”, in these cases the inter-person variation effect is very small. (2) At noon in summer, heat stresses (clothing resistance parameter values less than −2 clo) are registered. In these cases, high temperature and irradiation, as well as low or moderate wind, characterized the atmospheric environment. Then, the inter-person variation effect is clearly visible. (3) The strength of summer heat excess at noon seems to be larger than the strength of winter heat deficit in the early morning. (4) Clothing resistance differences caused by inter-person variations and by weather variations between the cities of Sopron and Szeged are comparable in the majority of cases. When they are not comparable, the site variation effect is much larger than the inter-person variation effect. The clothing resistance model is constructed for individual use and it can be equally applied on both weather and climate data.

Highlights

IntroductionThere are dozens of human thermal indices [1,2]. Initially, they were represented mostly as single parameters (e.g., air temperature [3], dew point temperature [4], apparent temperature [5]), or by their combination (e.g., discomfort index [6], effective temperature [7], air enthalpy [8])
Today, there are dozens of human thermal indices [1,2]
(4) Clothing resistance differences caused by inter-person variations and by weather variations between the cities of Sopron and Szeged are comparable in the majority of cases

Summary

Introduction

There are dozens of human thermal indices [1,2]. Initially, they were represented mostly as single parameters (e.g., air temperature [3], dew point temperature [4], apparent temperature [5]), or by their combination (e.g., discomfort index [6], effective temperature [7], air enthalpy [8]). The human body energy balancebased methods became increasingly popular [8,9,10,11,12,13]. In most of these approaches environmental thermal load [14,15,16,17,18] and human thermal sensation [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27] is characterized. An application of PET for calculating Tourism Climatic Index is outlined [38]

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