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Urban Heat Island and Future Projections: A Study in Thessaloniki, Greece

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Abstract

Future climate simulations have been produced for three 5-year periods until the end of twenty-first century using the WRF-ARW numerical weather prediction model for the greater area of Thessaloniki in the framework of the forecasting System for urban heaT Island effect (LIFE-ASTI) programme. In the present study, we analyse the characteristics of heat wave days in present and future at a central urban region of Thessaloniki and a rural region around the city in order to investigate the urban heat island effect under extreme heat. The number of heat wave days until 2100 is expected to increase by >12 times more than in the present. It is notable that more than 60% of the heat wave days within the urban area will be characterized by minimum temperatures ≥30 °C, while this percentage will be ~12% for the rural area. Finally, while in the present the urban heat island intensity during heat wave days presents mostly values 1–3 °C, in the future the intensity will be larger, in a few cases exceeding even 6 °C.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the LIFE Programme of the European Union in the framework of the project “Implementation of a forecasting system for urban heat island effect for the development of adaptation strategies—LIFE ASTI”. Results presented in this work have been produced using the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh) High Performance Computing Infrastructure and Resources.

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Correspondence to Stavros Keppas .

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Keppas, S. et al. (2021). Urban Heat Island and Future Projections: A Study in Thessaloniki, Greece. In: Dobrinkova, N., Gadzhev, G. (eds) Environmental Protection and Disaster Risks. EnviroRISK 2020. Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, vol 361. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70190-1_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70190-1_14

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