Exploring Urban Climate Mapping: TempMap Application in São Paulo, Brazil

Effective adaptation planning necessitates a stronger integration of climate science with urban planning, supported by tools that facilitate localized climate assessments. Climate mapping plays a crucial role in bridging this gap by providing insights into microclimatic conditions and informing urban interventions. For instance, Toulouse Metropole employs heat island intensity maps generated through TempMap, a GIS plugin (Touati et al., 2020) designed for modeling near-surface air temperatures, to define adaptation strategies.

In this study, we demonstrate the application of TempMap in São Paulo, Brazil—one of the largest cities in the world—utilizing data from a local meteorological network alongside information on topography and building characteristics. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first application of this method in a city of such scale.

One of the primary challenges encountered was the limited availability of weather stations (33 stations within an area of 1,500 km²) and GeoClimate data, a key component of the original TempMap method used to extract information on local morphology. Despite this limitation, we successfully adapted the method by integrating a local building dataset and calculating building density, impermeable surface density, and free external surface density in ArcGIS, in accordance with GeoClimate documentation. We then replicated the TempMap process using SAGA GIS.

The mean difference between measured and estimated temperatures was 1.22°C. Nineteen stations exhibited a deviation of less than one degree, while two stations recorded deviations exceeding three degrees. These findings indicate that TempMap provides promising results for estimating air temperatures, even with a relatively sparse network of weather stations. Furthermore, the results underscore the importance of a denser meteorological station network to enhance the accuracy of temperature estimates and have encouraged both the cities of São Paulo and Campinas to propose expanding their monitoring networks.