Mobile data acquisition and processing in support of an urban heat island study

Global warming and changes in Earth’s weather patterns are the main consequences of climate change, and bioclimate discomfort has significant public health problems, especially for the elderly. Normally, the thermal characteristics of urban areas are poor due to a phenomenon known as urban heat island. Mobile and fixed temperature measurements were performed on 19 March 2021 in the city of Bologna, Italy. Mobile measurements took place with a car, along a 75-km transect, starting at 22:16 with a duration of 2 hours and 41 minutes, while fixed measurements were done using 15 present weather stations and also placing five thermometers in the city center. Various interpolation models (i.e., Traditional, Voronoi Tessellation, Global Trends, Triangulated Irregular Networks, Inverse Distance Weighting and Kriging) were applied to correct the mobile measurements using fixed data. Kriging fulfilled the best result with a correlation coefficient of 0.99 compared to the raw temperatures.