Dry island effect on intermediate city, the case of the city of Mendoza

BOCHACA, FABIÁN R.; PULIAFITO, E.

Urbanization, Global Environmental Change, and Sustainable Development in Latin America

Digital Graff Press

Lugar: Sao José dos Campos Brazil ; Año: 2007; p. 77 - 104

Intermediate urban centers featuring the dynamics of constant growth, which results in land use changes, have started to witness the environmental problems commonly affecting the levels of comfort of large city dwellers. This chapter analyzes the integral behavior of intermediate cities and the dry island effect produced by the impermeabilization of surfaces to the detriment of green areas. The city of Mendoza will be used as the model for this analysis. To understand urban climate behavior in relation to variations in humidity and air temperature, we will focus the study on vegetated areas alternating with impermeabilized surfaces. Doing so requires including the various urban scales at which these spaces combined from a larger scale to an intermediate scale and from there to the microscale. Two types of variables are considered in this analysis: (1) weather variables such as air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and direction and temperature of materials; and (2) morphological variables such as percentage of built surfaces, type of materials, and shape and average height of built and green areas. Empirical verification of how these variations occur in urban centers was carried out by taking several measurements, from dawn until dusk, during the summer, in continuous runs throughout the city of Mendoza. The study enabled understanding how vegetated areas influence variations in humidity, reflected in changes in the temperature of the urban climate, particularly noticeable in intermediate cities with desert climates, as is the case of the city of Mendoza