A Study to Evaluate Urban Heat Mitigation Design Strategies to Improve Pedestrian’s Thermal Perception in Existing Canyons of Extreme Hot-Arid Cities. The Case of Phoenix, Arizona

The rapid rate of urbanization coupled with continued population growth and anthropogenic activities has resulted in a myriad of urban climate related impacts across different cities around the world. Hot-arid cities are more vulnerable to induced urban heat effects due to the intense solar radiation during most of the year, leading to increased ambient air temperature and outdoor/indoor discomfort in Phoenix, Arizona. With the fast growth of the capital city of Arizona, the automobile-dependent planning of the city contributed negatively to the outdoor thermal comfort and to the people's daily social lives. One of the biggest challenges for hot-arid cities is to mitigate against the induced urban heat increase and improve the outdoor thermal. The objective of this study is to propose a pragmatic and useful framework that would improve the outdoor thermal comfort, by being able to evaluate and select minimally invasive urban heat mitigation strategies that could be applied to the existing urban settings in the hot-arid area of Phoenix. The study started with an evaluation of existing microclimate conditions by means of multiple field observations cross a North-South oriented urban block of buildings within Arizona State University’s Downtown campus in Phoenix. The collected data was evaluated and analyzed for a better understanding of the different local climates within the study area, then used to evaluate and partially validate a computational fluid dynamics model, ENVI-Met. Furthermore, three mitigation strategies were analyzed to the Urban Canopy Layer (UCL) level, an increase in the fraction of permeable materials in the ground surface, adding different configurations of high/low Leaf Area Density (LAD) trees, and replacing the trees configurations with fabric shading. All the strategies were compared and analyzed to determine the most impactful and effective mitigation strategies. The evaluated strategies have shown a substantial cooling effect from the High LAD trees scenarios. Also, the fabric shading strategies have shown a higher cooling effect than the Low LAD trees. Integrating the trees scenarios with the fabric shading had close cooling effect results in the High LAD trees scenarios. Finally, how to integrate these successful strategies into practical situations was addressed.