Can abandoned cities create an Urban Heat Island effect?

Cities located at high latitudes are small in size, occupy an insignificant part of the total territory and do not have a noticeable influence on regional atmospheric processes. Assessment and forecasting of microclimate and ecology in such cities and their vicinities is the task of determining statistical characteristics of stratified turbulent currents with spatial detail up to scales comparable to the scales of individual buildings, and such studies have been already carried out.

However, a fundamental question remains unanswered in the literature: ‘Can an unheated and uninhabited area create its own “heat island?” and if so, how much less intense is it than in inhabited areas?  

Figure 1. Komsomolsky district. Photo by Gelio Slava Stepanov

The present study presents the results of experimental measurements of the thermal structure of an abandoned multi-storey settlement Komsomolsky (67°34‘N 63°48’E (Figure 1), extreme northeast Europe, Komi Republic, Russia) during summer and winter.  The obtained results demonstrate the presence of a weak thermal anomaly in the zone of the most dense building, with an intensity of up to 0.5-1 degree, which can be related to both radiation and dynamic factors. 
A more detailed study of the causes of this phenomenon in different synoptic situations will be made later, but it is already clear that the hypothesis of a heterogeneous thermal structure of an unheated abandoned high-rise microdistrict in the Arctic is at least justified within the framework of provided measurements.

Model experiments show ambiguous results in terms of the success of modelling such anomalies for the Komsomolsky settlement as the most large-scale settlement with the necessary features for studying the thermal anomalies.