Title: Assesing the Impact of Urban Canopy Thermal Level on Pedestrian Comfort and the Benefits of Vegetation in Colling
Abstract:
The urban microclimate is influnced by the heating and cooling rate of its urban canopies. After assessting the cooling benefits of street-trees of the city of Philadelphia in Pensilvania, we were able to measure summertime thermal comfort and find best senarios to improve the thermal comfort for each canopy. We studied human biometeoroogical parameters, such as Mean Radiant Temperature (Tmrt) and Physically Equivalent Temperature (PET) to assess the summertime thermal comfort for the study area. We Quantified the impacts of built environment with and without existing vegetation on pedestrian level temperature, observed the impacts of Tmrt, surface temperature (Ts), PET and global radiation through simulating for five different scenarios where urban canopies are characterized as: a) built environment without vegetation (BE), b) built environment with existing vegetation (BEEV), c) built environment with additional vegetation after 1-year (BEAV-1), d) built environment after 5-years (BEAV-5) and e) built environment after 10-years growth period (BEAV-10). Results show that planting trees in residential and mixed-use sites with higher Sky[1]view factor (SVF) can improve pedestrian comfort and Mixed-use sites were observed to provide highest thermal comfort and further benefit from tree plantation, while commercial sites receive lowest cooling benefit from street trees.
Biography:
Dr. Maryam Karimi, PhD, MPA is the Associate Director of Public Health and Environmental Sustainability, Sustainable Smart Cities Research Center at UAB. She has a Post Doctorate from Mailman School of Public Health, Colombia University. Maryam served as the lead advisor on a cooling and tree-planning project with Cooper’s Ferry Initiative and NJ Tree Foundation working to reduce the impact of UHI in impoverished neighborhoods of Camden, NJ and Birmingham. She has published more than 27 papers in reputed journals and two book chapters. She has been serving as an editorial board member for national and international jurnals.
