Urban cooling strategies applying at neighborhood scale for facing heatwave events

Abstract

Nowadays climate change is already affecting weather and climate extremes across the world, the scale of recent changes is unprecedented. Defined as prolonged periods of excessive heat, heatwaves are a specific type of extreme temperature event. Heatwaves are among the most dangerous of natural hazards. The study explored and analyzed how the implementation of heat-stress resilience strategies can create cooler settlements at neighborhood scale in arid contexts (Metropolitan Mendoza Area-Argentina). The methodology consists in an outdoor microclimate campaign and a computational model construction and statical validation for test outdoor cooling strategies (cool materials, street trees, densified, and the combination between them) in six scenarios. Results shows that combined strategies performance better, densified+cool materials+street trees, and cool materials+street trees. These scenarios can reduce temperatures for projected heatwave events by 3.8ºC in the maximum, 1.0ºC in the minimum and 2.1ºC in the average air temperatures; and 3.8ºC in the maximum, 0.8ºC in the minimum and 1.9ºC in the average air temperatures respectively. The main approach of the study is the evaluating of feasible strategies with the scope of generate neighborhood scale planning recommendations for cities with arid climates. Further studies would determinate which resilience strategy can be the most viable and cost-effective.