Urban heat maps in support of EU adaptation policy (u-MAP)

In this presentation, we will present and discuss a Destination Earth use case that intends to provide present and future high-resolution urban heat maps for cities across Europe to underpin and motivate urban climate adaptation measures that are being developed within the EU’s cohesion policy and the development of EU policies related to the urban environment.

In recent years, climate change has been causing increasingly frequent and intense heatwaves in Europe.  Climate projections indicate that the population exposure to extreme heat will rise by more than an order of magnitude towards the end of the century. Cities are especially at risk because of the urban heat island phenomenon, which may cause a doubling in the annual number of heatwave days compared to rural areas.   

Within the EU, large geographical disparities exist in present and future (projected) exposure to heat, cities and regions in South and Central Europe exhibiting a higher risk. The monitoring of such disparities is important for Europe’s cohesion policy, which aims to develop measures to assist the economic and social development of the EU’s less-favoured regions. While some monitoring of urban heat patterns has been achieved by means of thermal infrared remote sensing, this type of information does not allow to derive sectoral indicators; the high-resolution urban climate information required to do so is currently lacking.

The urban heat maps will be generated by means of a physics-based urban climate model, UrbClim, nested within large-scale atmospheric output provided by the DestinE adaptation digital twin.