International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—There are many signals of the impacts of global climate on pedestrian wind and thermal comfort, citizen health by exposure to the climate and air pollution concentrations and building energy demand energy. We have studied direct effects of the two future (2030, 2050 and 2100) climate projections, IPCC RCP 4.5 (stabilization emission scenario) and RCP 8.5 (little effort to reduce emissions), respect to present (2011), over three European cities: Madrid, Milan and London with very high spatial resolution: 50 meters. Climatic variables and air pollution concentrations are dynamically downscaled from 1º to 50m using a computational dynamical downscaling modelling system. The outputs of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) and its coupling with Weather Research and Forecasting and Chemical (WRF/Chem) model (25 km, 5km and 1km spatial resolutions) provides present and future climate scenarios. The output from the WRF/Chem model at 1 km resolution is used to drive a micro-scale computational fluid dynamics model, MICROSYS (50 m). The methodology to estimate percentages of climate/pollution-related deaths and hospital admissions due to global climate are based on epidemiologic analysis of weather/air pollution and health data to characterize and quantify mortality/morbidity associations. Building energy simulations are implemented with the EnergyPlus model using buildings prototypes which are based on ASHRAE 90.1 Prototype Building Modeling Specifications. Also urban comfort (wind, thermal) indicators from a pedestrian point of view are calculated. We propose to use the Dutch wind nuisance standard (NEN 8100) which applies a discomfort threshold for the hourly mean modeled wind speed. The physiological equivalent temperature (PET) is calculated every grid cell as index of the urban thermal comfort. This work is part of the European project DECUMANUS We have identified the highlight areas with elevated exposure to global climate from different point of views: comfort, health and energy; this information can be used to prepare plans and implement adaptations to reduce effects of climate change on the citizen and building energy demand.

Index Terms—Climate change, energy demand, health, dowscaling.

Roberto San José, Juan L. Pérez, and Libia Pérez are with Environmental Software and Modelling Group, Computer Science School, Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Madrid, Spain (e-mail: roberto@fi.upm.es, jlperez@fi.upm.es, lperez@fi.upm.es).
Julia Pecci, Antonio Garzón, and Marino Palacios are with Indra S.A., C/ Mar Egeo, 4, Pol. Industrial 1, 28830 San Fernando de Henares, Madrid, Spain.

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Cite: Roberto San José, Juan L. Pérez, Libia Pérez, Julia Pecci, Antonio Garzón, and Marino Palacios, "Direct Impacts of Global Climate Change on Urban Areas," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 208-215, 2017.