Investigation Effects of Environmental and Geographical Factors on Thermal Environment in Aging Rural Areas in Taiwan

In the recent years, under the influence of land cover changes and climate changes, more frequent extreme heat events have occurred and make people face severer heat stress than before, especially for the people of low socioeconomic status, elderly or other vulnerable groups. Moreover, although land cover changes in rural areas are milder than in urban areas, the rotation of crop fields and expansion of non-vegetation areas in rural areas will alter the landscape and further influence the thermal environment. However, the issues of thermal comfortability in aging rural areas have been rarely studied compared to the urban areas in the past. To quantify and mitigate the risk of heat exposure of the elderly in rural areas, the goal of this study is to analyze the spatial-temporal characteristics of thermal environment and heat-related comfortability in an aging rural areas, Yunlin County, in central Taiwan.

To characterize the spatial-temporal patterns of the thermal environment in Yunlin, this study estimated the spatial distribution of different meteorological parameters from seasonal to annual scales and analyzed the land cover compositions from the satellite remote-sensing images. Furthermore, to evaluate the effects of heat stress on the human comfort in aging rural areas, a thermal comfort index, physiological equivalent temperature (PET), was quantified using the meteorological data from weather stations in Yunlin and surrounding area with the Python package of pythermalcomfort. In addition, the statistical methods will be used to analyze how land use affects the microclimate and comfort in the Yunlin area from the community to regional scales. In brief, the anticipated results from this study are expected to characterize factors that affect the thermal environment in aging rural areas, and further provide management and policy suggestions for the reduction in the risk of heat exposure in the future.

Key words: Thermal comfortability, Physiologically Equivalent Temperature (PET), Heat stress, Elderly group