Summer in the City: Forecasting and Mapping Human Thermal Comfort in Urban Areas

Urbanization affects human thermal comfort and health, especially for vulnerable groups such as the elderly and people with established health issues. To mitigate adverse thermal comfort and accompanying excess mortality there is an urgent need of tools for forecasting urban thermal comfort on short to medium-ranged time scales. In this use-case, we present the setup of a prototype of a high-resolution forecasting system at a neighborhood scale spatial resolution. The system builds on both traditional data sources, such as height-and terrain maps, and aerial photographs, as innovative datasources like the Dutch cadastre and the Dutch Statistics office. Additionally, crowd sourced temperature observations, special measuring campaigns, and a dense network of meteo stations will be used for validation.