Urban Heat Island Features in the city of Mendoza, Argentina. The Effects of Urban Configuration and the Climatic Conditions

ERICA CORREA; CARLOS DE ROSA; GRACIELA LESINO

Libano

Conferencia; PLEA 2005. The 22th Conference on Passive and Low Energy Architecture; 2005

“The site investigated was Mendoza’s Metropolitan Area (MMA) or Greater Mendoza located at the foothills of the Andes Range at 790 m.a.s.l. in the western province of Mendoza. As is typical for many arid zones, the climate of the region is characterized by wide diurnal and seasonal temperature fluctuations, intense solar radiation in all seasons and a regime of low annual precipitation (250 mm).  This great city concentrates 65 % of the total population of the province, amounting to 973173 inhabitants occupying only 3% of its territory, it has an enormous population growth; 14% during the last decade. From the environmental viewpoint, this process is critical since the heat island phenomenon can significantly impact levels of air pollution, urban energy consumption, human comfort and incidence of heat related illness. In order to analyze the thermal behavior of the different microclimates within the urban area, both the absolutes values at the particular weather stations and -by normalization – the relative differences were compared each others. This was done firstly for the whole investigation period, but also for the obtained classes of day belonging to the same weather type and of days/nights with similar structure of local winds. The cartographic representation of climactic data obtained was made by means of a GIS software (Arc View 3.2), using the interpolation model Krigging Universal. Finally for to establish the relationships between the dependent variable (UHI) and the urban, geographical and climatic variables (sky view factor, altitude of the site, total height to floor area ratio, local green area, wind velocity, solar radiation, etc ), was applied an assessment by main components”.