INAHE   25987
INSTITUTO DE AMBIENTE, HABITAT Y ENERGIA
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Indices of Outdoor Thermal Comfort: A Comparative Study in Mendoza, Argentina
Autor/es:
M. ANGÉLICA RUIZ; ERICA N. CORREA
Lugar:
Freiburg
Reunión:
Simposio; SYMPOSIUM ON CHALLENGES IN APPLIED HUMAN BIOMETEOROLOGY; 2020
Institución organizadora:
Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources University of Freiburg
Resumen:
Outdoor human comfort is an essential factor to quantify the perceived quality of the urban microclimate. In order to achieve sustainable urban development, it is important to consider thermal comfort in the design phase. Specially, in arid regions, high outdoor air temperatures due to intensive solar radiation are present in hot summer seasons. Consequently, discomfort sensations and heat stress are expected. It is currently estimated that approximately one third of the world population lives in cities located in regions classified as extremely arid, arid or semi-arid.Since the beginning of the 20th century, human thermal comfort has been discussed exhaustively in several reports. More than 100 simple thermal indices, mostly two parameter indices, have been developed in the last 150 years in order to describe the complex conditions of heat exchange between the human body and its thermal environment. However, the existing works are characterized by a certain variety of instruments and methods.Therefore, this paper proposes the comparison of six thermal comfort indices and its contrast with subjective answers in winter, summer and annual. The goal is identifying which of them can be better used to predict thermal comfort in forested outdoor spaces of the Mendoza Metropolitan Area (MMA), an ?oasis city?. It is the fifth largest city in the country, with a population of 1,055,679, and covers 168 km2. According to the Köppen?Greiger classification, the climate of the city is arid: BWh or BWk depending on the isotherm.For this purpose, air temperature, solar radiation, relative humidity and wind speed of two meteorological stations in the downtown of MMA during winter of 2010 and summer of 2011 were selected for comparison. While the microclimatic monitoring was being carried out, people were also studied in their natural environment, through observation and structured interviews, in order to evaluate comfort levels and perception of the environment. The first part of the questionnaire consisted of items related to sex, age, clothing, and activity done before the interview and where they were coming from (to account for acclimatization). The second part addressed the perception of the thermal sensation on a 5-point scale, ranging from -2 (very cold) to +2 (very hot), going through zero (neutral), which has been defined as the Actual Sensation Vote, or ASV.The results showed that the indices have different correlations with subjective responses in both seasons. The UTCI reported an annual percentage of correct predictions of 48.8%, higher than the PMV (38.1%), COMFA (23.8%), GOCI (13.1%) and PET (3.6%) but lower than the IZA (78.6%), the local index. The higher predictive ability of this last index is due to the fact that it was specifically meant for the MMA?s population. Finally, this type of tools is very useful in the design and evaluation of the thermal behavior of open spaces according not only to climate criteria but also to the subjective characteristics of users.