Tamás Gál

Modelling of the Annual Mean Urban Heat Island Pattern for Planning of Representative Urban Climate Station Network

The spatial distribution of the annual mean urban heat island (UHI) intensity pattern was analysed for the medium-sized city Novi Sad, Serbia, located on the low and flat Great Hungarian Plain. The UHI pattern was determined by an empirical modelling method developed by (Balazs et al. 2009). This method was based on datasets from urban areas of Szeged and Debrecen (Hungary). The urban study area in Novi Sad (60 km2) was established as a grid network of 240 cells (0.5 km ×0.5 km). A Landsat satellite image (from June 2006) was used in order to evaluate normalized difference vegetation index and built-up ratio by cells. The pattern of the obtained UHI intensity values show concentric-like shapes when drawn as isotherms, mostly increase from the suburbs towards the inner urban areas. Results of this thermal pattern and determination of one of the local climate classification systems were used for recommending 10 locations for representative stations of an urban climate network in Novi Sad.

Airborne surface temperature differences of the different Local Climate Zones in the urban area of a medium sized city

This paper presents a case study about the surface temperature characteristics of the different Local Climate Zones (LCZ) in Szeged, Hungary. For the evaluation we apply high resolution surface temperature data acquired by a low-cost small-format digital imaging system, measured in early night hours. The map of Local Climate Zones for the study area is derived by an automatic GIS method for LCZ classification. The results show that the different LCZ classes have different surface temperature characteristics. Among the densely populated LCZ classes the open low-rise has the lowest surface temperature, thus it is can be the most favorable urban built-up type if the aim is the decrease the effect of the urban heat load.