Crowdsourcing Urban Air Temperature Data for Estimating Urban Heat Island and Building Heating/Cooling Load in London

Kit Benjamin, Zhiwen Luo and Xiaoxue Wang
Additional contact information
Kit Benjamin: Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6UR, UK
Zhiwen Luo: School of the Built Environment, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6UR, UK
Xiaoxue Wang: College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518061, China

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 16, 1-26

Abstract: Urban heat island (UHI) effects significantly impact building energy. Traditional UHI investigation methods are often incapable of providing the high spatial density of observations required to distinguish small-scale temperature differences in the UHI. Crowdsourcing offers a solution. Building cooling/heating load in 2018 has been estimated in London, UK, using crowdsourced data from over 1300 Netatmo personal weather stations. The local climate zone (LCZ) scheme was used to classify the different urban environments of London (UK). Inter-LCZ temperature differences are found to be generally consistent with LCZ temperature definitions. Analysis of cooling degree hours in July shows LCZ 2 (the densest urban LCZ in London) had the highest cooling demand, with a total of 1550 cooling degree hours. The suburban related LCZs 5 and 6 and rural LCZs B and D all had about 80% of the demand of LCZ 2. In December, the rural LCZs A, B and D had the greatest heating demand, with all recording around 5750 heating degree hours. Urban LCZs 2, 5 and 6 had 91%, 86% and 95% of the heating demand of LCZ D, respectively. This study has highlighted both advantages and issues with using crowdsourced data for urban climate and building energy research.

Keywords: crowdsourcing; building energy; urban heat island; local climate zone; degree hours; London (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/16/5208/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/16/5208/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:14:y:2021:i:16:p:5208-:d:620048

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().