Sun Blocked: Integrating Shade into Urban Climate Assessments

Despite its critical role in urban thermal comfort, shade remains underexplored in large-scale urban studies due to the absence of standardized tools for its integration. Existing urban analysis frameworks often overlook shade coverage when evaluating outdoor thermal conditions, limiting our understanding of its influence. This study addresses this gap by enhancing an existing shade quantification method to process any geolocated dataset with timestamps, generating enriched outputs that incorporate shade data. By leveraging high-resolution spatial data and computational simulations, this open-source tool expands the capabilities of current methodologies for assessing urban shade coverage.

We apply this tool to climate data collected using the Climate Bike in Amsterdam, which records six-directional longwave and shortwave radiation alongside other environmental parameters. By integrating shade metrics, we calculate thermal comfort indices at a city-wide scale and analyze the correlation between building and tree shade and urban thermal comfort, with a focus on mean radiant temperature (MRT). This large-scale study provides new insights into how shade influences outdoor thermal conditions in real-world urban settings.

Our findings provide the following contributions:

• A flexible and scalable tool for integrating shade data into diverse climate studies.
• A city-wide quantification of thermal comfort informed by shade.
• An accessible workflow that enables cities to conduct their own shade-inclusive climate studies.

By bridging the gap between urban studies and climate science, this work establishes a methodological foundation for climate adaptation strategies.