Urban Heat Island Estimation from Crowdsensing Thermometers Embedded in Personal Cars

Abstract

An ever-growing portion of the global population lives in urban areas. Cities are expanding quickly and consequently, the urban heat island effect has become a major health concern to maintain city dwellers’ thermal comfort. For this reason, city planners want to access urban meteorological databases in local areas where specific attention is needed. With the growth of connected devices, it is possible to collect unusual but massive temperature measurements from people’s activities. In this article, we study temperatures measured by thermometers embedded in everyday personal cars. To assess the quality of such opportunistic data, we first detect factors deteriorating the measurement. After preprocessing, the measurement error is then estimated thanks to two weather station networks providing a local-scale reference through the cities of Dijon and Rennes, France. The overall aggregation of private car temperature measurements allows us to estimate very precisely the urban heat island at a 200-m resolution. We detect the cooling effect of parks in Rennes and Paris urban areas. In Barcelona and Dijon, we observe the impact of regional environments and the orographic effect on the urban heat island. With our method, similar maps can be made accessible to every interested city in western Europe to target critical areas and support urban planning decisions.