Overall, the GREEN-POLIS is meant to provide a robust science-based analysis to promote a conscious and appropriate use of NBSs in the urban environment.
Publications in international peer-reviewed journals
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ABSTRACT: Urban air pollution is a significant hazard to human health, which is expected to worsen with the increase of urbanisation worldwide. There is a growing need to evaluate mitigation measures such as green Nature-Based Solutions. However, most studies focus on vegetation at street level, while the role of rooftop trees remains largely unexplored. Here, we investigate a simplified urban canyon where trees are placed on building rooftops, at the canyon-atmosphere interface level, which is a key area for pollutant removal mechanisms.
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ABSTRACT: Cities are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events such as heat waves or high summer temperatures, which greatly impact public health and well-being. Climate change is expected to intensify these events and blue Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), such as water channels, have the potential to effectively mitigate temperatures and regulate the urban microclimate, but their impact on urban canyon ventilation and thermal comfort is not well understood yet.
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ORAL PRESENTATION: The study aims to assess the impact of urban morphology and vegetative elements on the dispersion of pollutants emitted at ground level from traffic source. A neighbourhood in the historical city centre of Bologna (Italy) is selected as a case study. Airflow dynamics and pollutant concentration are reproduced and analysed by, both, laboratory experiments and high-resolution numerical simulations. Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) simulations are first validated against the experiments, then utilised to investigate the dispersion of pollutants in the city neighbourhood. The study enables a comparative analysis based on both experimental and numerical investigations, applied to a real urban geometry.
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ORAL PRESENTATION: This study presents the integration of a novel three-dimensional urban parameterization, the Three-Dimensional Urban Canopy Model (3DUCM), into the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model (WRF/3DUCM). Differently from traditional urban sub-grid scale parameterizations implemented into mesoscale meteorological models that consider a simple two-dimensional canyon geometry, representative of the average urban morphology of the mesoscale model grid cell, 3DUCM is a single-layer urban canopy model taking into account every single building of the urban area for the evaluation of the energy budget.
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POSTER: This contribution presents the Three-Dimensional Urban Canopy Model (3DUCM), a novel three-dimensional urban parameterization, and its implementation in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model (WRF/3DUCM). The 3DUCM is a single-layer urban canopy model that takes into account every single building of the urban area for the evaluation of the energy budget. It considers canyon orientation and also includes canyon edge effects, i.e., explicit crossroads modeling. Model output incorporates not only average grid cell variables, but also predicted fields down to the building scale. In this work, WRF/3DUCM is tested in the city of Rome during a summer heat wave. The results highlight the potential of incorporating single-building details to improve the representation of urban microclimates with mesoscale meteorological models.
An event dedicated to improving urban environmental governance and managing air quality in European cities. The project, which involves the metropolitan areas of Rome (Italy), Thessaloniki (Greece), and Nicosia (Cyprus), aims to strengthen the skills of local and regional authorities to more effectively address the challenges related to urban heat and air pollution.
Participants: S.Romano, P. Monti
