Introduction

On this homepage we provide information on the subject "Urban Climates". You can find information about addresses, literature, companies and meetings. In addition you can find a list with interesting homepages about Urban Climates and information about urban climate from cities all over the world.

This homepage Urban Climates does not treat the actual weather but the special climatic changes in the cities. More and more people live in big cities, sometimes with more than 10 million inhabitants. For a long time we know that the climate and the air-quality in cities strongly differs from those of the surrounding area. The Urban-Climatology explores these phenomenas.

A lot of the climatic effects in the cities are disadvantageous to the people who live there. For example heat stress in summer and smog in winter and in summer. Climatologists try to improve the environmental conditions by a city-planning which involves climatic experiences. Therefore climatic investigations take place in a lot of cities to get climatic and air-pollution data for city-planning.

To make an exchange of experiences possible, we are developing this homepage " STADTKLIMA / URBAN CLIMATES" which provides information about this subject from all over the world. The idea to create this homepage came up on the "Second Japanese / German Meeting" in Kobe (Japan) in september 1997.

In strong connection to the Urban-Climatology we must see the Human-Biometeorology, the Agricultural-Meteorology and the Technical-Meteorology.

WEATHER : WEATHER in meteorology is the physical situation of the atmosphere at a special time on a special location, destinated by the meteorological elements and their combination. Typical for WEATHER is the quick change sometimes.

CLIMATE: CLIMATE is the sum of all weather conditions, which characterize the mean conditions of the atmosphere on a special place in the world. The mean conditions are representated by statistical parameters (mean, frequency, extremes, periods and others) over a long time (e.g. 30 years)

URBAN CLIMATES: URBAN CLIMATES is the climate modified by the resulting effects of the development of cities ( including antropogenic heat and air pollution), (WMO, 1981)