Cities are particularly vulnerable to heat-waves because of their dense population combined with an amplification of the heat hazard caused by the urban heat island phenomenon. Heat event are sometimes associated with aerosol plume in the atmosphere, which affect the thermal comfort. This study shows that it can result in a thermal comfort improvement of up to 1 °C in sunny areas in cities while no difference in the shade of suburban areas.

The UMEP plug-in integrated in the free QGIS software can now calculate the spatial variation of the wind speed within urban settings. This paper shows that the new wind model, URock, generally fits observations well and highlights the main needed improvements. According to this work, pedestrian wind fields and outdoor thermal comfort can now simply be estimated by any QGIS user (researchers, students, and practitioners).

OpenStreetMap is a collaborative project aimed at creaing a free dataset containing topographical information. Since these data are available worldwide, they can be used as standard data for geoscience studies. However, most buildings miss the height information that constitutes key data for numerous fields (urban climate, noise propagation, air pollution). In this work, the building height is estimated using statistical modeling using indicators that characterize the building's environment.