The Variance of the Urban Microclimate in the City of Vienna, Austria

Metropolitan areas worldwide display highly diverse microclimatic conditions that are believed to be influenced by a variety of parameters: morphologies, structures, materials (particularly urban surface properties), and processes (mobility, industry, etc.). The density of urban structures and sealing of urban areas may lead to higher heat storage, thus increasing the daily urban air temperatures. In order to understand some of the relationships between the microclimates of urban neighborhoods, human activity and thermal environments that regulate microclimates, this paper investigates the intra-city microclimatic variance in several locations in the city of Vienna, Austria, which effectively portray urban and suburban climatic conditions. Specifically, we explore possible deviations of local (site-specific) microclimatic conditions from those captured by near-by stationary weather stations

The Extent and Implications of the Microclimatic Conditions in the Urban Environment: A Vienna Case Study

Recent challenges in the realm of urban studies concern better understanding of microclimatic conditions. Changes in urban climate affect cities at local and global scales, with consequences for human health, thermal comfort, building energy use, and anthropogenic emissions. The extent of these impacts may vary due to different morphologies and materials of the built environment. The present contribution summarizes the results of a multi-year effort concerned with the extent and implications of urban heat in Vienna, Austria. For this purpose, high-resolution weather data across six locations are obtained and analyzed. This allowed for an objective assessment of urban-level climatic circumstances across distinct low-density and high-density typologies. Subsequently, a systematic framework was developed for identification of essential properties of the built environment (geometric and material-related) that are hypothesized to influence microclimate variation. Results point to a number of related (positive and negative) correlations with microclimatic tendencies. Additionally, the impact of this location-specific weather data on building performance simulation results is evaluated. The results suggest that buildings' thermal performance is significantly influenced by location-specific microclimatic conditions with variation of mean annual heating load across locations of up to 16.1 kWhm−2·a−1. The use of location-independent weather data sources (e.g., standardized weather files) for building performance estimations can, thus, result in considerable errors

Empirical and Computational Issues of Microclimate Simulation

Part 1: Information & Communication Technology-EurAsia Conference 2014, ICT-EurAsia 2014International audienceThe dynamic variability of weather conditions and complex geometry and semantics of urban domain impose significant constraints on the empirical study of urban microclimate. Thus, numerical modeling is being increasingly deployed to capture the very dynamics of urban microclimate. In this context, the present paper illustrates the basic processes of calibrating and preparing a numerical model for the simulation of the urban microclimate

Negation of Croatian Nouns

The purpose of this paper is to describe a morphological grammar for recog-nizing negation of a noun and annotating its polarity accordingly. Not all nouns can be negated on the morphological level. For example, nouns like ‘activity’ and ‘knowledge’ (aktivnost, znanje) can have negatives (neak-tivnost, neznanje respectfully), but the same is not the case for nouns such as ‘battle’ or ‘table’ (bitka or stol). The most common and frequent Croatian prefix for negation of nouns is ‘ne-’ although several more are used either of Slavic (‘be-‘, ‘bez-‘) or Latin origin (‘anti-‘, ‘dis-‘). In some cases, negated nouns actually denote positive concepts, whereas their non-negated counter-parts are used for expressing concepts with negative connotations. For this purpose, all the nouns in NooJ dictionary, that may have nouns in both po-larities, are provided with [Polarity=pos] or [Polarity=neg] marker. This in-formation is used in the grammar to switch the polarity of the opposite noun after the insertion of a negative prefix. The grammar is tested on different types of corpora and results are discussed