With more than half of the world population living in urban agglomerations, monitoring, understanding and predicting the modifications occurring in the local climate by urbanization is critical in the perspective of climate sensitive urban design and planning. On the other hand, growing cities urban areas modify and sometimes amplify many of the processes behind global changes such as greenhouse gases build-up, increased water and energy demand, environmental pollution or loss of biodiversity, which have to be tackled for any effective adaptation and mitigation policy.

This session will address the critical topics relating urban systems and the climate system, the specificity of urban environment climates, modelling urban climates at all scales, application of climate understanding in architectural design or urban planning, as well as mitigation and adaptation of urban climate in the global change perspective.

Contributions on the following topics are especially invited:
• Monitoring and assessing urban climates, including climate changes and variability
• Interactions between climate change effects and urban agglomerations
• Modelling urban agglomerations of different complexity
• Topo-climatology of cities, the role of urban greens, irrigation, rivers, lakes and reservoirs on local climates
• Climates of buildings
• Urban water fluxes and urban metabolism under changing climatic conditions
• Direct and indirect greenhouse gas fluxes from and carbon stocks in urban systems
• Climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies in the urban environment
• Intrinsic urban atmospheric features: heat islands, circulation systems, etc
• Light and noise pollution in cities