PROJECT TITLE: Urban Heat Island Monitoring under Present and Futere Climate – UCLIMESA

Coordinator: National Meteorological Administration 

Partners: Advanced Studies and Research Center (ASRC); University of Bucharest/Faculty of Geography (UB)

Period: December 2013 – November 2015

Project director: Dr. Sorin Cheval

Project team:

The research staff is composed by highly qualified experts with backgrounds in various fields (e.g. physics, climatology, geography, topography, hydrology, remote sensing).

• The key NMA experts involved in the project UCLIMESA will be: Sorin Cheval (Project manager, urban climate), Andrei Diamandi (remote sensing), Aristita Busuioc (climate change), Alexandru Dumitrescu (urban climate, remote sensing, GIS), and Anisoara Irimescu (GIS, remote sensing).
• The key ASRC experts involved in the project UCLIMESA will be: Catalin Cucu-Dumitrescu (Person in charge, algorithms development), Florin Serban (digital image processing), and Sorin Constantin (GIS and Remote Sensing).
• The key experts involved in the project UCLIMESA will be: Ionut Sandric (Person in charge, Remote Sensing, GIS, Geostatistics), and Cristian Ioja (environmental planning, urban climate monitoring).

Description: Urban climate is a major element for the human well-being and environmental stability, and climate challenges expected for the next decades may exert additional pressures on the metropolitan areas. Air and surface temperature is particularly modified within urban spots generating the Urban Heat Island (UHI).

An important restriction in urban climate research: limited number of ground based meteorological sensors.

Satellite remote sensing provides the possibility to retrieve spatially quasi-continuous meteorological information: a valuable tool for analysing heterogeneous surfaces.

UCLIMESA will be carried out over the city of Bucharest, but the results are designed for smooth transfer and application to other urban areas.

Project objectives:

• To collect data relevant for the UHI examination from satellite products and ground measurements
• To study the relationships between the Land Surface Temperature (LST) and other variables in the urban area
• To downscale Regional Climate Models (RCM) data to urban scale under the A1B IPCC scenario
• To assess the characteristics of the Bucharest’s UHI under present and future climate conditions

Activities:

• WP1 – Ground Meteorological Data Aquisition and Analysis
• WP2 – Aquisition and Analysis of Relevant Urban Variables derived from Remote Sensing
• WP3 – Regional Climate Models Downscaling at Urban Scale
• WP4 – Urban Heat Island Integrated Assessment and Monitoring

Contributions to the STAR programme objectives:

Homepage: UCLIMESA