A novel approach to predict real-time urban heat island effect and indoor overheating

Quantifying urban heat island effect often requires the observation of air temperature distribution over the whole city. Satellite or aircraft mounted radiometers, car mounted temperature sensors and GPS loggers or fixed point monitoring have been employed in previous studies for urban heat island effect analysis. Above methods often are very expensive, labour intensive and have its own limitations. This paper proposes a novel approach to measure in real-time, and most importantly to predict urban heat island effect and indoor overheating through weather forecast data feeds services, such as the UK Met Office DataPoint service, which releases 3-hourly site-specific forecast for nearly 6,000 locations in the UK. The geographic high resolution weather forecasts are made available for over 300 locations around London, which provides rich dataset for urban heat island effect study and indoor overheating study. In this paper, authors have compared the observed temperatures with next 24-hour forecasts from 7 difference forecast providers. The relatively small difference (often less than 1C) provides us confidence in creating ‘true’ temperatures for locations that do not have weather observation stations. This enables built environment researchers and industrial partners to predict indoor temperature and mitigate indoor overheating risks effectively.