Influence of changing trees locations on thermal comfort on street parking lot and footways

Abstract

© 2017 Elsevier GmbH Locations of trees in street parking lots (SPL) impact outdoor thermal comfort and should be considered during the urban planning process. In this paper we developed a procedure for changing trees locations in order to improve outdoor thermal comfort on SPL and associated footways. Furthermore, a sensitivity test on the effect of different tree crown shapes on outdoor thermal comfort was carried out. We applied theprocedure on real-world SPL design in the City of Novi Sad (Serbia). A temporal analysis is performed for the heat wave period using Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) calculations in the Ladybug software. The results showed improvement of outdoor thermal comfort on 77 % of all body locations in proposed SPL design with predetermined number of trees. The largest outdoor thermal comfort improvement was noticed in the afternoon hours with up to 3.3 °C UTCI decrease on single body location. By adding trees to the SPL, heat stress was reduced on 84 % of all body locations with maximal UTCI decrease of 3.7 °C on single body location. Furthermore, heat stress reduction by cylinder-shaped tree crowns showed to be more pronounced compared to the sphere-shaped and the cone-shaped tree crowns. Proposed procedure showed that the locations of trees as well as tree crown shapes are very important for the improvement of outdoor thermal comfort and creation of environmentally conscious SPL design.