Understanding heat patterns produced by vehicular flows in urban areas

Rui Zhu, Man Sing Wong, Éric Guilbert, Pak Wai Chan

Research output: Journal article publicationJournal articleAcademic researchpeer-review

46 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Vehicular traffic has strong implication in the severity and degree of Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect in a city. It is crucial to map and monitor the spatio-temporal heat patterns from vehicular traffic in a city. Data observed from traffic counting stations are readily available for mapping the traffic-related heat across the stations. However, macroscopic models utilizing traffic counting data to estimate dynamic directional vehicular flows are rarely established. Our work proposes a simple and robust cell-transmission-model to simulate all the possible cell-based origin-destination trajectories of vehicular flows over time, based on the traffic counting stations. Result shows that the heat patterns have notable daily and weekly periodical circulation/pattern, and volumes of heat vary significantly in different grid cells. The findings suggest that vehicular flows in some places are the dominating influential factor that make the UHI phenomenon more remarkable.
Original languageEnglish
Article number15869
JournalScientific Reports
Volume7
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2017

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General

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