Evaluating radiant heat in an outdoor urban environment: Resolving spatial and temporal variations with two sensing platforms and data-driven simulation

Dorit Aviv, Hongshan Guo, Ariane Middel, Forrest Meggers

Instruments measuring the outdoor radiant environment are limited spatially. They aggregate observations to singular points, eliminating variations from surrounding surface temperatures. Computational methods can characterize the heterogeneous outdoor radiant environment, but spatial validation with accurate tools remains difficult. We use two novel sensing platforms (MaRTy and SMaRT) and an innovative computational validation method to explore Mean Radiant Temperature (MRT) spatial variation outdoors.

Highlights: • Measurement of Mean Radiant Temperature (MRT) using two novel instruments. • Analysis of spatial variation of radiant heat transfer outdoors in Philadelphia.  • Simulation of distributed MRT through outdoors space using thermal images and 3D data. • Impacts on heat stress and urban heat from shortwave and longwave radiation.

Read the full paper on Urban Climate Journal.