Urban Climatology - History

History

Luke Howard is considered the father-figure of urban climatology based on his book The Climate of London, which contained continuous daily observations from 1801 to 1841 of wind direction, atmospheric pressure, maximum temperature, and rainfall.

Urban climatology has gained much momentum in recent centuries based on global industrialization and more importantly, urbanization. The process of urbanization changes the physical surroundings and induces alterations in the energy, moisture, and motion regime near the surface. Most of these alterations may be traced to causal factors such as air pollution; anthropogenic heat; surface waterproofing; thermal properties of the surface materials; and morphology of the surface and its specific three-dimensional geometry—building spacing, height, orientation, vegetative layering, and the overall dimensions and geography of these elements. Other factors that must be considered are relief, nearness to water bodies, size of the city, population density, and land-use distributions.

Read more about this topic:  Urban Climatology

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