Impacts of town characteristics on the changing urban climate in Vantaa

In this work, the climatic impacts of modifying urban surface characteristics are examined for the medium-sized city of Vantaa, Finland, in the current climate and in a projected future climate of 2040\u20132069. In simulations with the SURFEX air-surface interaction model with a horizontal resolution of 500\u202fm, the fraction of green spaces and relatively sparsely built suburban-type land use was increased at the expense of more densely built commercial and industrial areas. The influence of this land use intervention was found to be rather modest but comparable to the effects of the expected climate change under the RCP8.5 greenhouse gas scenario. For temperature, the climate change is the dominating effect, while wind speed is mainly controlled by surface characteristics. For relative humidity, climate change and the imposed intervention are of comparable importance. The results of this sensitivity study are intended to support policy makers by assessing the potential impact of altering the urban layout in order to improve thermal comfort or as a countermeasure to climate warming in a high-latitude city

Modelling winter conditions of streets and pavements in a changing climate

Ilmatieteen laitoksen tiesäämalli RoadSurfia, säämalli HARMONIE-AROME:a, ilman ja alustan vuorovaikutuksia kuvaavaa malliyhdistelmä SURFEX:ia ja kaupungin energiatasemalli TEB:iä käytettiin mallintamaan tulevaisuuden ilmaston tiesääolosuhteita Helsingissä ja pääkaupunkiseudulla. Käytetyn hilaruudukon tarkkuus oli SURFEX/TEB-mallilla 500 m ja 2,5 km HARMONIE-AROME-sääajoissa. Tiesää- ja jalankulkuolosuhteita tutkittiin erikseen RoadSurfin eri asetuksilla. Mallinnetut ilmaston muutokset perustuvat RCP8.5-kehityskaareen ja ilmastonmuutosmalleihin. Aikahorisontiksi valittiin 2040–2069. Tämä tutkimus on osa kahta EU-projektia, URCLIM:ia ja iSCAPE:a. Mallien ennustamat sääolosuhteiden muutokset ovat merkittävimpiä ilman lämpötilassa. Mallinnetut tulokset osoittavat, että sekä vaikeat tieolosuhteet että liukkaat jalankulkuolosuhteet vähenevät merkittävästi. Sekä tiesää- että jalankulkuolosuhteissa näkyy selviä, mutta ei niin merkittäviä, riippuvuuksia kaupungin rakennustyypistä.FMI’s road weather model RoadSurf, weather model HARMONIE-AROME and surface modelling platform SURFEX with Town Energy Balance model TEB were used to model weather and especially road and pedestrian weather conditions in a changing climate in the Helsinki capital region. The grid resolution was 500 m for SURFEX/TEB and 2.5 km for HARMONIE-AROME. The simulated effects of climate change were based on the Representative Concentration Pathway RCP8.5 and several climate change models. The modelled time horizon was 2040–2069. The study is part of two EU-projects, URCLIM and iSCAPE. The climatological changes are most significant in air temperature forcing. The model results show that the number of difficult road and pedestrian conditions decrease significantly. Both road and pedestrian conditions depend clearly on the urban morphology, but these dependencies are not very strong

Effect of the urban microenvironment on the indoor air temperature of the residential building stock in the Helsinki region

| openaire: EC/H2020/894511/EU//SUREFIT Funding Information: This research was funded by projects HEATCLIM (Heat and health in the changing climate, Grant No. 329306 ) and HERCULES (Health, Risk and Climate change: Understanding Links between Exposure, hazards and vulnerability across spatial and temporal Scales, Grant No. 329241 funded by the Academy of Finland within the CLIHE (Climate change and health) program. SUREFIT (Sustainable solutions for affordable retrofit of domestic buildings) funded by the European Union (Horizon 2020 program, Grant No. 894511 ). Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The AuthorsDue to climate change, there is an increased risk of apartment overheating. In Nordic countries, heatwaves have not been common in the past and hence apartments are not equipped with mechanical cooling systems, so wise urban design might be a solution. This study evaluated the influence of the urban microenvironment on residential building indoor air temperature via green view index (GVI), floor area ratio and distance from the sea. We analyzed a large dataset of over 2000 apartments in the Helsinki region during summers of 2018 and 2021, where severe heatwaves were presented, and combined it with the aforementioned parameters. In the method used, closely situated buildings were clustered into groups by the microenvironment parameters. The results showed consistent correlations between clustered groups and microenvironment parameters, where the best-performing group had an indoor air temperature of about 1 °C lower than the average during the summers and 0.7 °C lower during the severe heatwaves. Building groups with higher GVI demonstrated a greater ability to endure long heatwaves, where combined influence of other urban microenvironment factors was significantly reduced. A substantial influence of sea distance and floor area ratio was observed during short heatwaves in the middle and late summer. The indoor temperature difference of the groups was compared to the average outdoor temperature difference of group areas based on the Finnish Meteorological Institute HARMONIE-AROME weather model implemented with the SURFEX module. The results revealed a consistent correlation between predicted outdoor and indoor temperatures and their distribution of group-to-area differences.Peer reviewe

Detailed report on local meteorological conditions Deliverable 6.4 iSCAPE project

This report documents findings from Task 6.4.1 \u201cSimulation of Climate Change in test case EU Cities\u201d. The report includes climate projections for all iSCAPE target cities: Bologna, Bottrop, Dublin, Guilford, Hasselt and Vantaa. The magnitudes of climatic changes in the six cities by the year 2050 were derived from a large number of climate model simulations. An atmosphere-surface interaction module was then used to study climatic impacts of a \u201cPassive Control System\u201d (PCS) intervention in one of the cities, Vantaa, in the current climate and in a projected future climate. The intervention consisted of increasing the fraction of green spaces and relatively sparsely built suburban-type land use at the expense of more densely built commercial and industrial areas

Detailed report of the effect of PCSs on air quality in the future CC (2050) in the target cities Deliverable 6.5 iSCAPE project

This report is the output of the work carried out in Task 6.4.2 of the iSCAPE project, which focuses on the evaluation of the effectiveness of Passive Control Systems (PCS) on air quality under future climate change scenarios in the target cities. The evaluation of the efficacy of PCSs has been conducted by reconstructing detailed air quality maps in three iSCAPE cities, namely Bologna, Dublin and Vantaa, chosen as representative of south, western and north Europe respectively. Following a thorough validation of all numerical models used in present scenarios, simulations have been conducted using downscaled climate projections for the three cities. Changes in air quality in future climate scenarios and in the presence or absence of selected PCSs are documented allowing to extract recommendations for the selected cities and easily extendable to other European cities

Air pollution and meteorology monitoring report (Update). Deliverable 5.2(Update). Project iSCAPE, Grant Agreement number: 689954

This is the updated version of D5.2, whose aim is to document good quality meteorological and air pollution data obtained in the various experimental field campaigns carried out in the different iSCAPE cities, namely Bologna, Dublin, Guildford and Vantaa. Experimental field campaigns were setup and carried out in those iSCAPE cities with a specific focus on the evaluation of the impacts on Passive Control Systems (PCSs) on the mitigation of air pollution and the enhancement of urban thermal comfort (i.e., Bologna in Italy, Dublin in Ireland, Guildford in United Kingdom and Vantaa in Finland), while the other two iSCAPE cities (Bottrop in Germany and Hasselt in Belgium) focused instead on infrastructural and behavioral interventions only, and no dedicated experimental field campaign was setup within the iSCAPE project. As mentioned in the first version of this Deliverable, the campaigns were ad-hoc setup with two preliminary purposes: 1. To provide the scientific basis to evaluate the impact of different PCSs and other meteorological factors on air pollution in each city; 2. To gather data useful to verify the model simulations run as part of other WPs (e.g., WP4 and WP6) with the aim of evaluating the impact of infrastructural and behavioral interventions at larger scales (neighborhood and urban). Similar to the first version of this report, before presenting the specific results obtained in each city, the updated version presents the instrumental setup and methodologies adopted in the various field campaigns, summarizing and updating those previously presented in D3.3 (‘Report on footprint of PCSs1’) and in the first version of this Deliverable. Notwithstanding the difference in the experimental setups adopted in the various experimental campaigns, a common general result obtained is the strong dependency of the impact of the different PCSs on the local morphology of the analyzed urban environment and on the local meteorological conditions, among which in particular wind direction plays a dominant role, leading potentially to both mitigation and deterioration effects of air pollution. In addition, in Guildford colocation experiments of low-cost sensors with reference instrumentation were carried out to develop algorithms to analyze the data from low-cost sensors and to investigate the performance of low-cost sensors

The Urban Climate Services URCLIM project

International audienc