Tromsø is undergoing rapid urban transformation, facing challenges from climate change, densification, and the shrinking of green spaces, which are vital components of the city's bio-cultural heritage. As modern infrastructure expands, the city's microclimate shifts, impacting thermal comfort, resilience, and overall urban sustainability. One critical aspect of this transformation is the urban heat island (UHI) effect, where built environments retain more heat, altering temperature patterns across different urban scales.

This presentation explores how science and art together offer a holistic approach to understanding and visualizing these environmental changes. Using green spaces and urban heat island mapping, remote sensing, and land surface temperature analysis, we assess how urban morphology and vegetation influence microclimates at city, neighborhood, and building scales. Green spaces —recognized as biocultural heritage—are crucial in mitigating temperature extremes, particularly in densely built environments, but their distribution and accessibility remain uneven.

Beyond scientific measurement, this study also considers the “regime of seeing”—how data-driven mapping and artistic representation shape the way we perceive and understand urban climate dynamics. By combining scientific precision with artistic visioning, we explore new ways of reimagining Tromsø’s urban future and ensuring climate-adaptive, resilient development. This interdisciplinary approach provides a practical and inclusive model for balancing modern infrastructure with preserving green spaces and thermal comfort, ensuring a sustainable future for Arctic cities.

How to cite: Miles, V. and Zaslavskaya, O.: Mapping Cold Climate Urban Heat Islands and the Regime of Seeing, 12th International Conference on Urban Climate, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 7–11 Jul 2025, ICUC12-782, https://doi.org/10.5194/icuc12-782, 2025.

Indigenous people remain at the margins of discussions about urban climate, although they are often the first ones to experience the negative consequences of climate change. In particular, they are often part of marginalized communities with limited access to decision-making and resources necessary for resilience, including equitable healthcare and traditional food systems. The research gap remains in understanding the intersection between urban climate impacts, Indigenous communities' health, and the protection of Indigenous rights. As the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, the ties between urban climate and people illustrate broader tension between the necessity to address climate change while supporting well-being.  This paper explores relations between Indigenous well-being and urban climate in Fairbanks, Alaska, drawing on data collected through interviews and observations conducted during five field trips in 2022–2025. Based on the preliminary results from the analysis of gathered data, we argue that even in urban conditions, Indigenous well-being heavily depends on multigenerational human-nature relations that constitute biocultural heritage. Therefore, we call for ethically and responsibly engaging Indigenous communities in urban climate research to produce more nuanced knowledge and address issues of equity and justice. This engagement would support deepening the understanding of climate change and its differential effects on social groups and cultures and advance efforts to address systemic inequities and promote justice. By prioritizing Indigenous perspectives and fostering the co-production of knowledge, researchers and policymakers can develop more effective and equitable climate responses that enhance well-being and resilience for all.

How to cite: Kuklina, V. and Khaziakhmetova, D.: Indigenous well-being and urban climate: lessons from the Arctic, 12th International Conference on Urban Climate, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 7–11 Jul 2025, ICUC12-220, https://doi.org/10.5194/icuc12-220, 2025.

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. 

How to cite: Konstantinov, P., Kospanov, A., Timazhev, A., Dolgikh, A., and Shuvalov, S.: Can abandoned cities create an Urban Heat Island effect?, 12th International Conference on Urban Climate, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 7–11 Jul 2025, ICUC12-967, https://doi.org/10.5194/icuc12-967, 2025.

In the modern era of modeling and remote sensing, in situ urban meteorological observations still remain critically important for validating urban climate models, remote sensing products, and developing data-driven ML models. To collect such data, more urban meteorological networks are being deployed, along with the development of new methods to use opportunistic sensing technologies, such as citizen weather stations. However, the Arctic—a large and unique region—has been largely overlooked in urban meteorological observations and urban climate studies in general until recently.

To address this gap, we established the Urban Heat Island Arctic Research Campaign (UHIARC) in several cities in North-Eurasian Arctic in Russia (Konstantinov et al., 2018, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aacb84; Varentsov et al., 2018, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-17573-2018). Here we present the results of long-term meteorological observations from the UHIARC campaign conducted over the past decade (2015-2023) in seven cities: Murmansk, Apatity, Vorkuta, Salekhard, Nadym, Novy Urengoy, and Norilsk, with many sites monitored for several years, and resulted harmonized observational dataset.

Collected data offers new insights into UHI climatology in the Arctic. We demonstrate that Arctic UHIs are significantly stronger in winter, with mean winter intensities ranging from 0.8 to 1.8 K, while mean summer intensities do not exceed 0.5 K. Extreme UHI intensities also peak in winter, reaching 5-6 K at the 95th percentile and 7-8 K at the 99th percentile. These extremes typically occur under a strongly stable ABL with intense temperature inversions. Among the studied cities, Norilsk and Nadym exhibited the strongest UHIs, while Murmansk, the largest Arctic city, showed the weakest UHI effect due to its coastal position near an unfreezing sea inlet, leading to less stable atmospheric stratification in winter.

The study was supported by Russian Science Foundation, project no. 23-77-30008, and by Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, project no. FSSF-2024-0023.

How to cite: Varentsov, M., Konstantinov, P., Slukovskaya, M., Korneykova, M., Esau, I., and Baklanov, A.: Urban Heat Islands in the Arctic: Long-Term Observations in Seven North-Eurasian Cities, 12th International Conference on Urban Climate, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 7–11 Jul 2025, ICUC12-225, https://doi.org/10.5194/icuc12-225, 2025.

The study of thermal anomalies for cities in extreme continental climates is of both practical and fundamental interest. Microclimatic differences (urban heat island) there are most pronounced compared to cities in other types of climates. 
In this regard, the team of authors has for the first time carried out large-scale measurements of the intensity and spatial structure of the heat island of the city of Yakutsk (62°01'48‘’N 129°43'48‘’E) in the Far East (Republic Yakutia, Russian Federation). 
This report describes the results of a microclimatic experiment to study the thermal structure of the city of Yakutsk using an independently deployed TZONE thermal sensor network in summer and winter.  The entire city was covered by the measuring infrastructure consisting of 18 sensor units for a two-month period  summer 2024. As a result, the data obtained unambiguously indicate the formation of a summer temperature anomaly in Yakutsk, which can be classified as a ‘summer heat island’, the intensity of which reaches 2.5-3.6 degrees Celsius in the night hours (a diagnostic sign of a heat island - Fig1). The average value of the heat island for the entire summer period can be estimated within 1.3-1.6 degrees Celsius. Significant heterogeneity in the daily course of temperature within the city and in the background zone is also noted. 

Figure 1. Nighttime Yakutsk summer heat island 
Of particular interest is the study of the heat island during the winter period ( with air temperatures from -35 to -45 degrees Celsius). A low temperature sensor network TZONE of 9 units showed the existence of instantaneous differences of up to 8-10 degrees Celsius with rural areas, with average heat island intensities of up to several degrees Celsius. 
This winter urban heat island monitoring has been supported by the grant of the Russian Science Foundation, RSF project №23-77-30008

How to cite: Konstantinov, P., Semenova, A., Antipina, U., Timofeev, M., Maratkanova, V., Tananaev, N., Mukhartova, I., Ivanova, O., Timazhev, A., and Baklanov, A.: Urban Heat Island in extreme continental climates: Yakutsk case-study (measurement networks from -47C to +35C), 12th International Conference on Urban Climate, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 7–11 Jul 2025, ICUC12-1029, https://doi.org/10.5194/icuc12-1029, 2025.