Advancement of Urban Heat Island Studies

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue will be devoted to the urban meteorology as an important and contemporary scientific direction. As is known urban areas in the World totally represent only ~2% from the Earth surface but the urban population exceeds already 55% out from the Earth population. A phenomenon of the ‘Urban Heat Island’ (UHI) was discovered for the first time at the beginning of the 19th century in London and, since that time, it was studied at almost all big cities around the World. Moreover, some more detailed effects such as local ‘cool islands’ at urban forests were also investigated at a lot of cities. Nevertheless, the available accumulated data about UHI are still insufficient due to diversity of geographical conditions and quick change of global climate. Thus, this Special Issue represents an actual topic.

Usually stationary data of weather stations are used for studying of long-term dynamics of UHI with great statistical significance. Mobile experiments using sensors installed at trains, cars, bicycles, etc., as well as temporary increased station networks are usually episodic and short in time but their results are more detailed and allow studying of the UHI spatial fine-structure. One more way is use of satellite data about so-called ‘Surface Urban Heat Islands’ (SUHI) which are both regular and detailed.

In conditions of global warming the important application of the urban meteorology is a mitigation of the UHI thermal effect, especially during heat-waves. In hot climates UHI is negative phenomenon which increases thermal stress for people. On the contrary, at high latitudes (e.g., in Arctic) UHI is rather positive phenomenon which prevents urban population from extremely strong frosts and reduces the urban heating cost.

Besides air temperature, cities usually influence on the spatial fields of other parameters such as humidity, precipitation, wind velocity, solar radiation, concentrations of minor air gases and aerosol particles, and so on. Thus, specific phenomena like ‘Urban Dry Island’, ‘Urban Pollution Island’ and others are important objects of studying as well. Atmosphere Journal cordially invites all specialists to prepare their papers for this issue.

Dr. Mikhail Lokoshchenko
Dr. Lyubov Alekseeva
Dr. Kishor Zingre
Guest Editors

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