According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007), global climate change, which will lead to a temperature increase of the lower atmosphere, can be traced to an increased concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other infrared-active gases. Urban agglomerations are particularly affected because, in contrast to the surrounding rural areas, they are characterised by a high ...

Heat waves are projected to become more frequent, longer-lasting, and intense. At the same time, urban areas are confronted with the urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon, which adds to the thermal stress experienced during hot spells. Focusing on the Paris area during the hot summer of 2003, we investigated the influence of heat waves on UHI intensity, i.e., the urban-rural temperature contrast. ...

The aggregate potential for urban mitigation of global climate change is insufficiently understood. Our analysis, using a dataset of 274 cities representing all city sizes and regions worldwide, demonstrates that economic activity, transport costs, geographic factors, and urban form explain 37% of urban direct energy use and 88% of urban transport energy use. If current trends in urban expansio...

Climate and tourism are strong correlated. Urban areas have a relevance concerning not only to cultural tourism but also for recreation. The high discussed topic of global change is focused in the tourism climatology as well. We analyzed exemplarily the climate potential and its variation of Freiburg. The analysis is based on the simulations of the regional climate models REMO and CLM for the A...

Mounting research highlights the contribution of ecosystem services provided by urban forests to quality of life in cities, yet these services are rarely explicitly considered in environmental policy targets. We quantify regulating services provided by urban forests and evaluate their contribution to comply with policy targets of air quality and climate change mitigation in the municipality of ...

Freiburg is a city with about 200.000 inhabitants located in the southwest of Germany where thermal level is the highest within the country. Therefore, urban climate plays a dominant role in urban planning in Freiburg. Due to its location in the river Rhine's valley, urban climate in Freiburg is influenced by a regional wind system (‘Hoellentaeler“) caused by the near black forest (Gross 1989)....

Urbanisation is a long standing problem and phenomenon all around the world. It means more and more challenges for scientists. Remote sensing techniques with high spectral and spatial resolution open novel approaches which enable the analysis of vegetated and non-vegetated urban surfaces with high heterogeneity. In this paper it is demonstrated how hyperspectral images and thermal maps can be u...

A lthough urban areas comprise a very small fraction of Earth’s land cover (Schneider et al. 2009), over half of global population live in urban agglomerations. Therefore, it is important to monitor, understand, and predict the modifications occurring in local weather and climate due to urbanization, particularly for the perspective of accurate high-resolution weather and air-quality forecastin...

Ecosystem services (ES) in cities and surrounding suburban areas are one of the major factors which guarantee quality of life. Most studies directly referring to urban ecosystem services are conducted on a local scale or for selected cities. There are few studies which focus on temporal changes of the provision of ecosystem services across a large number of cities. This paper analyzes selected ...

To further evaluate the factors influencing public heat and air-quality health, a characterization of how urban areas affect the thermal environment, particularly in terms of the air temperature, is necessary. To assist public health agencies in ranking urban areas in terms of heat stress and developing mitigation plans or allocating various resources, this study characterized urban heat in Cal...