What light does 10 years of experience with the Urban Health Initiative (UHI) shed on how advocates can realign public opinion, public decision making, and public funding to support large-scale social change? The UHI, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, aims to spur measurable improvement in the health and safety of children in five cities nationwide. The initiative’s ambitious strate...

This study compared the diurnal and seasonal cycles of atmospheric and surface urban heat islands (UHIs) based on hourly air temperatures (Ta) collected at 65 out of 262 stations in Beijing and land surface temperature (Ts) derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer in the years 2013–2014. We found that the nighttime atmospheric and surface UHIs referenced to rural cropland stat...

This paper quantitatively investigates the sustainability of the universal health insurance coverage (UHI) system in Thailand while taking into account the country's rapidly aging population and large informal labor sector. We examine the effects of population aging and informal employment across three tax options for financing the UHI. A modern dynamic general equilibrium framework is utilized...

Traditional studies of urban climate used air temperature observations from local urban/rural weather stations in order to analyze the general pattern of higher temperatures in urban areas compared with corresponding rural regions, also known as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. More recently, satellite remote sensing datasets of land surface temperature have been exploited to monitor UHIs. W...

Numerical simulations are conducted using the Weather Research and Forecast 6 (WRF) numerical model to examine the effects of a marine air intrusion (including a sea7 breeze front), in an easterly wind regime on 7 May 2008, on the structure of London’s urban 8 heat island (UHI). A sensitivity study is undertaken to assess how the representation of 9 the urban area of London in the model, with a...

The combined usage of high-resolution satellite images and thermal infrared (TIR) data helps understanding the thermal effect of urban fabric properties and the mechanism of urban heat island (UHI) formation. In this study, three typical urban functional zones (UFZs) of downtown Shanghai were chosen for quantifying the relationship between fine-scale urban fabric properties and their thermal ef...

Mitigation of the urban heat island (UHI) effect at the city-scale is investigated using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model in conjunction with the Princeton Urban Canopy Model (PUCM). Specifically, the cooling impacts of green roof and cool (white/highalbedo) roof strategies over the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area during a heat wave period (7 June–10 June 2008) are assess...

Urbanisation is one of the major drivers of ecosystem change and includes increased temperatures in cities leading to an urban heat island (UHI). This study quantified the phenological response of odonates across London, UK, from 1990 to 2012, using a database of 1,031,277 historical sightings. The ordinal flight dates of each species were used to calculate the leading edge, middle and trailing...