Urban heat islands: Potential effect of organic and structured urban configurations on temperature variations in Dubai, UAE

Urban heat islands are phenomena that occur coupled with rapid urban developments. The study was carried out to show the effect of organic and structured urban configurations on temperature variations throughout the year, especially in summer. The study investigated a larger area of the city rather than merely building-to-building relationships. It went beyond the confinement of street and building geometries and investigated how a number of these geometries put together in one context contributed to temperature variations. Computer simulation software was used to simulate three different urban configurations, representing an organic configuration in the Bastakiyah model and two structured configurations represented in the Orthogonal and Volume Ortho configurations. The simulations were carried out in Dubai, UAE for summer, winter, and autumn with fixed initial input temperature value of 32 °C and varying initial wind speeds (0.1 m/s and 3.6 m/s; and 7 m/s for summer case only).

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