Modeling effects of urban heat island mitigation strategies on heat-related morbidity: a case study for Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

A zero-dimensional energy balance model was previously developed to serve as a user-friendly mitigation tool for practitioners seeking to study the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Accordingly, this established model is applied here to show the relative effects of four common mitigation strategies: increasing the overall (1) emissivity, (2) percentage of vegetated area, (3) thermal conductivity, and (4) albedo of the urban environment in a series of percentage increases by 5, 10, 15, and 20% from baseline values. In addition to modeling mitigation strategies, we present how the model can be utilized to evaluate human health vulnerability from excessive heat-related events, based on heat-related emergency service data from 2002 to 2006.