Abstract
The cities of desert climates are anticipated to recognize a synergy of urban heat island (UHI) and severe heat waves during summertime. To improve the urban thermal environment, the present study aims quantitatively explore a strategically designed network of vegetation patches called green infrastructure (GI) in subtropical desert cities such as Dubai. To achieve a more comfortable temperature environment, we built and simulated four GI situations with higher GI fractions, GI25, GI50, GI75, and GI100. Using a mesoscale urban model, the mosaic approach is utilized to test potential thermal improvement and urban climate impact, and a portion of each urban grid cell in the model domain is altered with various species of urban vegetation patches by 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. The daily peak reduction in ambient temperature at 17:00LT is similar to 0.0168 °C per unit of GI increase when compared to the untreated scenario; however, the maximum anticipated daytime summer temperature decline for GI25, GI50, GI75, and GI100 is 0.6 °C, 1.1 °C, 1.4 °C, and 1.7 °C, respectively. The associated reduction in nighttime ambient temperature per unit increase in the GI is 0.0432 °C, with a maximum temperature drop of around 2.4 °C for the GI100 scenario. Increased GI reduces the height of the planetary boundary layer (PBL) by up to 468 m, which might lead to greater pollution concentrations. While GI-based cooling has a significant influence on delayed sea breeze and humidity, it may raise the risk of heat discomfort in the indoor building environment. This study adds to our understanding of the potential for GI mitigation as well as the seasonal impact of developing GIs on the desert urban boundary layer.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are indebted to the mesoscale climate modeling community for their remarkable scientific efforts to develop the WRF model. The authors are also dully acknowledged to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF 2011): ERA-Interim reanalysis dataset, Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) for providing meteorological inputs for forcing the WRF model.
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Funding note: Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Afifa Mohammed, and Ansar Khan. Supervision, project administration, and conceptualization were executed by Mattheos Santamouris. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Afifa Mohammed, and Ansar Khan and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Mohammed, A., Khan, A. & Santamouris, M. Numerical evaluation of enhanced green infrastructures for mitigating urban heat in a desert urban setting. Build. Simul. 16, 1691–1712 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-022-0940-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-022-0940-x