Vegetation has a well-known potential for mitigating urban overheating. This work aims to explore the effects of enhancing urban greenery in Melbourne (Australia) through a configuration of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model including the Building Effect Parameterization and the Local Climate Zones and presents novelties in: i) covering two-months and ii) focusing on air circulation and buildings cooling energy demand through the ventilation coefficient (VC) and the cooling degree hours (CDHs). A control case and two "what-if" scenarios with a growing green coverage equal to 35 % (control case), 50 % (modest increase) and 60 % (robust increase) have been designed and then simulated for January and February 2019.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAccording to the European Environment Agency, the year 2015 was the warmest on record to that point, with a series of heat waves from May to September resulted in high levels of tropospheric ozone. The implications of such a year on the human well-being and health are therefore of multiple nature and can be quantified referring to the exceedances of the corresponding thresholds. This work focused on the analysis of the May-September period of 2015 in the city of Milan (Italy) in terms of Mediterranean Outdoor Comfort Index (MOCI) and ozone concentrations, recorded by monitoring stations and modeled through the Weather Research and Forecasting model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study presents an analysis of the thermo-hygrometric conditions in the city of Konya (Turkey). A one-year transversal field survey was carried out in the Selçuk University campus and 2295 valid questionnaires were collected. In each questionnaire, randomly selected interviewees provided personal information and judged their perception and thermal preference according to the ASHRAE 7-point and McIntyre scales, respectively.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcoregionalization is the process by which a territory is classified in similar areas according to specific environmental and climatic factors. The climate and the environment strongly influence the presence and distribution of vectors responsible for significant human and animal diseases worldwide. In this paper, we developed a map of the eco-climatic regions of Italy adopting a data-driven spatial clustering approach using recent and detailed spatial data on climatic and environmental factors.
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