Multiscale Environmental Monitoring in Urban Topoclimate

Abstract

Climate is a complex system subject to much natural and anthropogenic interference. Urban microclimates and topoclimates need effective methodologies to localize coexisting phenomena, including multiscale approaches that demonstrate their relational character. Air temperature, air relative humidity, and wind are microclimatic variables that can be evaluated with respect to their qualitative energy flow characteristics. The technical performance of this monitoring depends on a good estimate of the statistics of the digital signal assessed, which in turn represents greater care in the management and implementation of structural change indicators derived from frequency-domain modeling. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze the power spectra of the air temperature, air relative humidity and wind data series using the traditional Morlet Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) and the Cross Wavelet Transform (XWT), with Wavelet Coherence (WC) analysis. The daily, monthly and annual scales were studied, and the results demonstrated significant interrelationships between the variables. The WC values found were validated by the Monte Carlo method, scalograms and spectrograms, representing seasonal and daily cycle frequencies. The urban fractions presented behavior in accordance with the seasonality of tropical climates of the Cerrado, as well as of interference of the urban roughness. The CWT, XWT and WC tools are adequate for urban monitoring and planning analyses, qualitatively reflecting the urban dynamics of microenvironments