Transcript An urban heat island is a metropolitan area which is significantly

The Urban Heat Island Experiment
Dr Sylvia Knight FRMetS
Head of Education & Continuous Learning
Royal Meteorological Society
[email protected]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7929584.stm
Urban Heat Islands
An urban heat island is a metropolitan
area which is significantly warmer than
its surrounding rural areas.
Causes:
• There is little bare earth and vegetation in urban areas.
• Less energy is used up evaporating water,
• Less of the Sun's energy is reflected
• More heat is stored by buildings and the ground
• The heat generated by heating, cooling, transport and other energy
uses
• The complex three dimensional structure of the urban landscape.
Urban Heat Islands
The temperature difference is usually larger at night
than during the day, and usually larger in the summer
than in the winter, and is most obvious when winds are
weak and skies are clear.
Excess mortality rates in early August 2003
indicate about 40,000 heat-related deaths
Daily mortality in Baden-Württemberg
Temperature anomaly (wrt 1961-90) °C
European 2003 summer temperatures
observations
HadCM3 Medium-High
2003
2050s
What’s that got to do with the UHI?
• London – 600 heat related deaths
• Up to 9 °C warmer than surrounding rural areas
• Mortality increases when temperatures are over
22°C
• Mortality particularly linked to warm night time
temperatures
• Mortality linked to age, sex, deprivation etc.
• Challenge now to design buildings and urban
areas for the future
The RMetS Big Urban Heat
Island Experiment
• Generate data sets for most of the major UK cities and towns
• Raise understanding of urban heat islands amongst the general
public
• Make the data available to teachers in a user friendly format
• Generate data which researchers and planners can use as well
• Raise the profile of the RMetS amongst teachers!
Public Involvement
• Reliant on local media & contacts with local groups etc.
• Any thermometer available
• Car thermometers
• Text in temperature & postcode at home or on arrival at
destination
Schools Involvement
• Wrote to all schools in Greater
Manchester, inviting them to participate.
• Hundreds of simple, calibrated digital
thermometers.
• Letters to all parents.
SCORCHIO
Sustainable Cities: Options for Responding
to Climate cHange Impacts and Outcomes
• Develop
a detailed picture of the spatial temperature patterns
across Greater Manchester
• Develop a suite of GIS-based decision-support tools which will
allow for the analysis of climate change adaptation options in
urban areas, with a particular emphasis on heat and human
comfort
Altrincham girls grammar school involvement
• Heads of science and geography got involved, together with a ‘champion’ group
of girls taken from years 10-13
• Distributed 200 thermometers to students in the school and in primary schools
in their area
• Ran year group assemblies for classes through the school
• Coordinated the press involvement with the project
• Collected data and thermometers as pupils arrived for school, drawing their
own results map
Press Involvement
06/03/09 00:00Z Analysis Chart
Data collected:
• Over 1000 data points collected from that
one morning!
• 300 texts sent in by the general public
• 320 results collected by Altrincham
grammar and 3 other schools
• Remaining data collected from ‘serious
amateurs’, and ‘official’ weather stations
around Manchester
• Not all the data could be used.
Temperature/ land use correlation
And Finally…
Coming soon – Birmingham, Edinburgh…..etc.
www.metlink.org/urban