Thermal Climate Index Research Articles

The outdoor thermal climate conditions at a historical mountainous tuberculosis sanatorium site in Greece

This work deals with the assessment of the outdoor environment of a sanatorium site in mountainous conditions which were historically considered favourable in the treatment of tuberculosis patients in the pre‐antibiotic era. Thermal climate conditions are estimated through application of the thermal climate index (THI) to site‐specific air temperature and relative humidity data along with kata‐thermometer data recorded at the balconies outside of patients’ rooms. Results show that the cold conditions dominate throughout the winter period at all observation times, whereas conditions of comfort prevail during summer, in morning and evening hours, and occur frequently in spring and autumn at noon.

The UTCI and the ISB

Thermal effects of the environment are the most prominent environmental influences on the human body. Keeping the body core temperature in a narrow optimum range is the dominating physiological process. Thus, assessing thermal environments has been a major field in biometeorology for many decades, which is also reflected in the number of respective articles and their citations. In the early days of thermal assessments, simple indices only considering a few environmental parameters were used. The next step has been the development of heat budget models describing all relevant heat/energy fluxes to and from the human body. One of the first was PET, which has been presented in the most cited IJBM publication ever (1999). All of these models created by individual scientists have some shortcomings and confinements in their application. In order to overcome such restrictions and to bring the state of the art scientists of thermal modelling together a working group to define a "universal" thermal climate index (UTCI) has been founded, backed and driven by an own commission of the International Society of Biometeorology. This working group has developed a comprehensive open source tool to calculate UTCI for the assessment of outdoor thermal environments for biometeorological applications (see the IJBM special issue 56 (2012) on UTCI).