Urban climates of large cities: Comparison of the urban heat Island effect in Latin America

Abstract

The large cities (at least five million inhabitants) in Latin America have grown in terms of both population and spatial extent and have modified the climate more drastically than medium to small cities. These modifications include surface and atmospheric urban heat islands, air pollution, dry islands, etc. Furthermore, the distribution of these modifications in cities follows the morphologies acquired by the various sectors of the city, which are defined as local climate zones. This chapter contains an exhaustive review of the literature of the eight larger cities of Latin America and a presentation of some of the differences and similarities between them and their urban climates. The authors have concluded that not all the large Latin American cities have been studied with the same intensity and that, therefore, the results for the various cities are quite different. Nevertheless, the intensities of the heat islands in these large cities have been found to vary between 3°C and 8°C, and population density and latitude offer partial explanations for these differences between urban and non-urban temperatures. A pending task for the large Latin American cities is the incorporation of the new analytical methodologies that are currently proposed with regard to local climate zones.