Assessment of the Effects of Urban Heat Island on Buildings

Climate change and global warming have been indisputable as supported by mounting evidence of more extended, severe, and frequent occurrences of extreme weather events (EHEs), in particular, summertime heatwaves in recent years. EHEs often interact with buildings in urban area centers, which are densely packed by building blocks with vulnerable populations: the homeless, elderly, children, socially disadvantaged people, the physically challenged, or the sick, creating a unique natural phenomenon, urban heat island (UHI). This chapter covers a comprehensive effort to assess the UHI impacts on buildings and the potentially vulnerable populations through a series of surveys and field measurements in schools and hospitals, and a multi-scale climatic modeling framework from global and regional climates, urban microclimate, to building scale simulations. General methodologies are reported in detail for a better understanding of the levels of impacts by UHIs on buildings, e.g., excessively high indoor temperatures, energy demands and peak loads, and on people, e.g., indoor overheating risks. The effort is essential for developing measures and strategies to mitigate the UHI impacts on buildings and occupants for the current and future climates.