Index Geophysics

Generalized Scaling of Urban Heat Island Effect and Its Applications for Energy Consumption and Renewable Energy

In previous work from this laboratory, it has been found that the urban heat island intensity (UHI) can be scaled with the urban length scale and the wind speed, through the time-dependent energy balance. The heating of the urban surfaces during the daytime sets the initial temperature, and this overheating is dissipated during the night-time through mean convection motion over the urban surface. This may appear to be in contrast to the classical work by Oke (1973). However, in this work, we show that if the population density is used in converting the population data into urbanized area, then a good agreement with the current theory is found. An additional parameter is the “urban flow parameter,” which depends on the urban building characteristics and affects the horizontal convection of heat due to wind. This scaling can be used to estimate the UHI intensity in any cities and therefore predict the required energy consumption during summer months. In addition, all urbanized surfaces are expected to exhibit this scaling, so that increase in the surface temperature in large energy-consumption or energy-producing facilities (e.g., solar electric or thermal power plants) can be estimated.

T.-W. Lee

Heung S. Choi

Jinoh Lee

Meteorology. Climatology

QC851-999

Hindawi Limited

2014-01-01T00:00:00Z

article

1687-9309

1687-9317

10.1155/2014/948306

https://doaj.org/article/1fdc3a9b9d1e4be2a3407d0799307c4b

Advances in Meteorology, Vol 2014 (2014)

EN

http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/948306

https://doaj.org/toc/1687-9309

https://doaj.org/toc/1687-9317

Journal Licence: CC BY