Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Climate Change is now an unequivocal fact (IPCC, 2014). Consecutively, exists a broad consensus on the role of cities regarding CC, and hence, the Urban Heat Island (Oke, 1973) occupies an especially relevant role. This scientific and technical consensus, however, does not seem to have influenced urban planning practice. The analysis of the UHI is today a fundamental element for the proper understanding of the main factors on contribution of cities to CC. The development of explanatory models of the structure of climate in Metropolitan Areas should enable the adoption of measures to mitigate the adverse effects of CC.

This paper builds a set of physical and statistical models of urban heat island in order to integrate them into a platform for multiscale simulation of the climate system of the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona (MRB). The development at different scales of these models serves to distinguish the effects of city size, urban structure (monocentric/polycentric), development model (compact/dispersed), as well as the morphology and materials in the urban climate at the MRB. Multiscale models of climate simulation that includes the complexity of the metropolis: the whole system as a unit, the level of urban subsystem, as well as city and district level. All this aims to help decisionmakers and suggest ecommendations to mitigate the effects of climate change and to increase resilience at regional and urban planning scale.