An empirical model for the urban heat island intensity for a site in Manchester

Abstract

The urban heat island intensity is the difference in temperature between a site close to the centre of a city and a site close to but outside the city (the rural site). The urban heat island intensity varies continuously throughout the day and is strongly dependent on the weather conditions at the time. The most important weather parameters are the wind speed, the cloud cover and the solar radiation. We have developed an empirical model for the urban heat island intensity and applied it to a site near the centre of Manchester and a rural site at Rostherne, approximately 17 km away. Weather data from the Met Office station at Rostherne are available from the British Atmospheric Data Centre. Our model uses the measured wind speed, the measured cloud cover and the measured solar radiation from Rostherne. The parameters of the model are adjusted to give a best fit to the measured urban heat island intensity for the year 2014. The model is then used to predict the hourly urban heat island intensity for the first six months of 2015, obtaining good results especially as the values of the parameters are not changed throughout the year and the model does not make use of the temperatures at either site. The accuracy of the model is such that if used for a basic heating and cooling load calculations the accuracy of the annual demand is high.

Practical applications: Many buildings that building services engineers and other building designers design are in urban or city centres. However, the weather data for their designs are based on near-rural weather data which do not include the urban heat island effect. This paper describes a method to ascertain the urban heat island effect in the centre of Manchester. A designer could apply this for Manchester and as an initial indication to other similar urban areas. This will allow the rural weather data to be adjusted on an hourly basis for the urban heat island effect throughout the year.