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© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

The worsening urban heat island (UHI) effect poses a great challenge to the thermal comfort of people outdoors. However, there has not been a summary of the mechanisms by which UHI affects outdoor thermal comfort (OTC). This paper reviews the commonly used OTC evaluation indexes, data collection methods, and mitigation measures and discusses the relationship between UHI and OTC. The review is limited to peer-reviewed journal publications found in five databases: Science Direct, Scopus, Google Scholar, PubMed, and Web of Science. The review results indicate that physiological equivalent temperature (PET), universal thermal climate index (UTCI), and wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) are the most widely used indexes in outdoor thermal comfort studies. The data collection methods mainly include questionnaire surveys, measurement, simulation, and formula calculation. There are four main approaches to mitigating the UHI effect in order to improve the comfort of people outdoors: vegetation strategies, water strategies, urban planning strategies, and material strategies. Future research can focus on developing OTC research methods and indexes and combine thermal comfort with visual comfort, auditory comfort, etc. to better evaluate the overall comfort.

Details

Title
A Review on the Impacts of Urban Heat Islands on Outdoor Thermal Comfort
Author
Ren, Jianlin 1 ; Shi, Kaizhe 1 ; Li, Zhe 1 ; Kong, Xiangfei 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Zhou, Haizhu 2 

 School of Energy and Environmental Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin 300401, China; [email protected] (J.R.); [email protected] (K.S.); [email protected] (Z.L.); [email protected] (X.K.) 
 China Academy of Building Research, Beijing 100010, China 
First page
1368
Publication year
2023
Publication date
2023
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
20755309
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2829777688
Copyright
© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.