UTCI—Why another thermal index?

By G. Jendritzky, R. Dear, G. Havenith. International journal of biometeorology, 2011

1,050 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Existing procedures for the assessment of the thermal environment in the fields of public weather services, public health systems, precautionary planning, urban design, tourism and recreation and climate impact research exhibit significant shortcomings. This is most evident for simple (mostly two-parameter) indices, when comparing them to complete heat budget models developed since the 1960s. ISB Commission 6 took up the idea of developing a Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) based on the most advanced multi-node model of thermoregulation representing progress in science within the last three to four decades, both in thermo-physiological and heat exchange theory. Creating the essential research synergies for the development of UTCI required pooling the resources of multidisciplinary experts in the fields of thermal physiology, mathematical modelling, occupational medicine, meteorological data handling (in particular radiation modelling) and application development in a network. It was possible to extend the expertise of ISB Commission 6 substantially by COST (a European programme promoting Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action 730 so that finally over 45 scientists from 23 countries (Australia, Canada, Israel, several Europe countries, New Zealand, and the United States) worked together. The work was performed under the umbrella of the WMO Commission on Climatology (CCl). After extensive evaluations, Fiala’s multi-node human physiology and thermal comfort model (FPC) was adopted for this study. The model was validated extensively, applying as yet unused data from other research groups, and extended for the purposes of the project. This model was coupled with a state-of-the-art clothing model taking into consideration behavioural adaptation of clothing insulation by the general urban population in response to actual environmental temperature. UTCI was then derived conceptually as an equivalent temperature (ET). Thus, for any combination of air temperature, wind, radiation, and humidity (stress), UTCI is defined as the isothermal air temperature of the reference condition that would elicit the same dynamic response (strain) of the physiological model. As UTCI is based on contemporary science its use will standardise applications in the major fields of human biometeorology, thus making research results comparable and physiologically relevant.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Environmental Engineering, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

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Citations in the corpus

A review on the CFD analysis of urban microclimate (2017, neutral): “– Validation/target parameters: a) Temperature related: Air temperature (°C) (AT); Dry-bulb temperature (°C) (DBT); Indoor air temperature (°C) (IAT); Mean radiant temperature (°C) (MRT); Surface temperature (°C) (ST); Wet bulb globe temperature (°C) (WBGT); b) Thermal comfort related: Physiological”
Overview of the PALM model system 6.0 (2019, methodology): “, 2012), universal thermal climate index (UTCI; Jendritzky et al., 2012; Bröde et al., 2012), and physiologically equivalent temperature (PET; Höppe, 1999) are supported, directly calculated in PALM, and used as output.”
Magnitude of urban heat islands largely explained by climate and population (2019, background): “air humidity, and wind speed rather than surface temperature alone 39 .”
Behavioural Perspectives of Outdoor Thermal Comfort in Urban Areas: A Critical Review (2019, background): “Examples are the effective temperature index (ET) [49], predicted mean vote (PMV) [50], physiological equivalent temperature (PET) [51–53], the universal thermal climate index (UTCI) [54], and the COMFA (outdoor thermal comfort model) [55], inter alia.”
Modified physiologically equivalent temperature—basics and applications for western European climate (2018, background): “…Höppe 1987; Matzarakis et al., 1999), standard effective temperature* (SET*) (Gagge et al. 1971, 1986), and Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) (Jendritzky et al. 2012; Havenith et al. 2012), which are both based on a steady energy balance model, have been developed for severe evaluation of…”
A comprehensive review of thermal comfort studies in urban open spaces. (2020, methodology): “For PET and UTCI, the influence of clothing on outdoor thermal comfort should be determined with greater accuracy.”