Influence of diversified relief on the urban heat island in the city of Kraków, Poland

Abstract

In cities located in concave landforms, urban heat island (UHI) is an element of a complicated thermal structure and occurs due to the common impact of urban built-up areas and orography-induced processes like katabatic flows or air temperature inversions. Kraków, Poland (760,000 inhabitants) is located in a large valley of the river Vistula. In the years 2009–2013, air temperature was measured with the 5-min sampling resolution at 21 urban and rural points, located in various landforms. Cluster analysis was used to process data for the night-time. Sodar and synoptic data analysis provided results included in the definition of the four types of night-time thermal structure representing the highest and the lowest spatial air temperature variability and two transitional types. In all the types, there are three permanent elements which show the formation of the inversion layer, the cold air reservoir and the UHI peak zone. As the impact of land use and relief on air temperature cannot be separated, a concept of relief-modified UHI (RMUHI) was proposed as an alternative to the traditional UHI approach. It consists of two steps: (1) recognition of the areal thermal structure taking into consideration the city centre as a reference point and (2) calculation of RMUHI intensity separately for each vertical zone.