Abstract-Climate change is one of the main concerns of our times, and it became even more noticeable due to its impact on global temperature, precipitation patterns, and even arctic sea ice melting. Moreover, it has been proven that climate change is one of the main factors affecting the Urban Heat Island (UHI); which in its turn, increases the energy demand in sustainable cities, where reducing power costs still a major challenge. Furthermore, in order to keep a balanced environment, and contribute to temperature mitigation, the use of vegetation cover is definitely one remarkable strategy. It helps decreasing the temperature down to the values required in sustainable development, reducing energy consumption, and lowering Greenhouse Emission (GHE). In this work, we assess the impact of green-roofs on UHI, and we try to define a decision model that helps calculating the best green-roof/green-infrastructure ratio. Besides, we aim to identify the best practices and measures to take in order to mitigate the UHI in semi-arid climate areas.Our work involves the use of a Geographic Information System (GIS), which provides a support to estimate the greenery conditions. Our methodology is based on a probabilistic and comparative approach, and evaluated using different green-roof models. We select a residential area in Constantine, Algeria as our study subject, and we use ENVI-met as the software support. Among the findings of this study, providing proper, yet experimentally proven recommendations on how, how much and where to use green roofs, was our main contribution. In addition, the results of our study indicate not only the impact of green-roofs on UHI, but also the effect of large-scale green-roof installation on the liveable areas in sustainable cities.Index Terms-Climate change, geographic information system, green-roofs, sustainable development, urban heat island.
The courtyard is an ancient outdoor design space surrounded by walls or buildings, acting as a microclimate modifier in hot-dry climates. This is related to its geometry, such as high proportions of height-to-width (H/W) and north-south (NS) orientation by providing shade and decreasing heat stress on hot summer days. However, its effect during winter still needs to be discussed, especially in hot summer and cold winter conditions (such as in semi-arid climates). This research studies the winter thermal comfort of a typical courtyard geometry suitable for hot summer conditions in a semi-arid climate. A literature review supports the identification of typical courtyard geometry addressed for hot summer conditions. Then, field measurements of the external surface temperature of courtyard interior orientations, microclimatic variables, and the Predicted Mean Votes (PMV) of occupants inside the courtyard were performed. The results indicate high correlations between PMV and courtyard interior orientations with the H/W ratio regarding cold stress. Thus, north-east and South-East orientations and H/W ratio less than (< 0.8) are recommended for better winter environmental conditions in semi-arid climates.
Green Roof (GR) is one of the most applied strategies to Mitigate Urban Heat Island (UHI) recommended for sustainable cities. This research aims to examine and evaluate the effect of the GR/UGI ratio on UHI mitigation, creating Urban Cool Island (UCI). The study was carried out at Constantine, situated in the East part of Algeria, characterized by a semi-arid climate with high summer solar radiation intensity. An urban climate analysis was conducted during the hottest period of the year by means of remote sensing data using ArcGIS 10.2 platform. The results displayed that vegetation, urban density, and topography strongly affect UHI. Furthermore, other finding results in this research show that fixing GR/UGI ratio (with 0.0063 reduced the average air temperature by 1.24°C) in a large-scale urban area, can reduce the surface temperature by 4.00 degrees of the studied area.
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