Monitoring the effect of urban green areas on the heat island in Athens

Abstract

The role of urban green areas in the microclimatic conditions of cities, during summer, is investigated in this paper through monitoring campaigns carried out at the National garden, at the city centre of Athens. Two types of investigations were carried out: i) a microscopic one that investigated the thermal conditions inside the Garden and the immediate surrounding urban area and ii) a macroscopic one that compared the temperature profile of the Garden with that of the greater city centre area. It was concluded that in microscopic level, the temperature profile inside the National Garden and the immediate surrounding urban area did not showed a clear evidence of the influence of the Garden and it was dependent on the characteristics of each location. In a macroscopic scale, the Garden was found cooler than the other monitored urban locations and temperature differences were mainly greater during the night, especially in streets with high building height to street width (H/W) ratio and low traffic, while in streets with high anthropogenic heat during the day, the biggest temperature differences were recorded during the day.

Mapping Green Spaces in Bishkek—How Reliable can Spatial Analysis Be?

“…This lush vegetation essentially is the only ‗green' factor of the city and contributes substantially to the quality of life of Bishkek's residents. As ascertained by [1] and [2], vegetation affects urban climate by moderating temperature, increasing humidity, influencing wind speed and reducing noise. Further desirables are reduction of solar radiation, view screening and visual amenity.…”

Urban green spaces activities: A preparatory groundwork for a safety management system

“…On the one hand, they can contribute to improving environmental conditions through the reduction of air pollution (Nowak, Crane, & Stevens, 2006;Yang, McBride, Zhou, & Sun, 2004), regulating the micro-climates (Bernatzky, 1983;Dimoudi & Nikolopoulou, 2003), alleviating the heat island effect (Oliveira, Andrade, & Vaz, 2011;Zoulia, Santamouris, & Dimoudi, 2009), reducing the road traffic noise (Van Renterghem & Botteldooren, 2009), and preventing local floods caused by stormwater runoff from impervious surfaces (Dietz, 2007). Nevertheless, on the other hand, green spaces are high-required workforce activities (McPherson, 1992;McPherson, Simpson, Xiao, & Wu, 2011) so that a complex and professional approach is needed to protect workers and residents during all phases of these work sites (Rahardjo et al, 2009;Ricard & Bloniarz, 2006).…”

Small green areas for energy saving: effects on different urban settlements

“…However, the built environment-green areas interactions influencing the green cooling effects depend also on other elements related to urban form and geometry, such as building density, buildings height, width of streets, building orientation (Zhou et al, 2011;Li et al, 2012;Zoulia et al, 2009;David Suzuki Foundation, 2015). For instance, by considering different spatial resolutions (Li et al, 2012;Li et al, 2013), found that the percentage of cover of green space is correlated negatively with land surface temperature and that, the more closely linked and continuous the green spaces are, the stronger the cooling effect is.…”