Deriving the operational procedure for the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI)

By P. Bröde, D. Fiala, K. Błażejczyk, I. Holmér, G. Jendritzky, B. Kampmann, B. Tinz, G. Havenith. International journal of biometeorology, 2012

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The Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) aimed for a one-dimensional quantity adequately reflecting the human physiological reaction to the multi-dimensionally defined actual outdoor thermal environment. The human reaction was simulated by the UTCI-Fiala multi-node model of human thermoregulation, which was integrated with an adaptive clothing model. Following the concept of an equivalent temperature, UTCI for a given combination of wind speed, radiation, humidity and air temperature was defined as the air temperature of the reference environment, which according to the model produces an equivalent dynamic physiological response. Operationalising this concept involved (1) the definition of a reference environment with 50% relative humidity (but vapour pressure capped at 20 hPa), with calm air and radiant temperature equalling air temperature and (2) the development of a one-dimensional representation of the multivariate model output at different exposure times. The latter was achieved by principal component analyses showing that the linear combination of 7 parameters of thermophysiological strain (core, mean and facial skin temperatures, sweat production, skin wettedness, skin blood flow, shivering) after 30 and 120 min exposure time accounted for two-thirds of the total variation in the multi-dimensional dynamic physiological response. The operational procedure was completed by a scale categorising UTCI equivalent temperature values in terms of thermal stress, and by providing simplified routines for fast but sufficiently accurate calculation, which included look-up tables of pre-calculated UTCI values for a grid of all relevant combinations of climate parameters and polynomial regression equations predicting UTCI over the same grid. The analyses of the sensitivity of UTCI to humidity, radiation and wind speed showed plausible reactions in the heat as well as in the cold, and indicate that UTCI may in this regard be universally useable in the major areas of research and application in human biometeorology.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Physiology

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Citations in the corpus

Modified physiologically equivalent temperature—basics and applications for western European climate (2018, methodology): “The thermal conditions calculated by mPET, Source: (The Commission for Thermal Physiology of the International Union of Physiological Sciences 2003 a Bröde et al. 2012) bMatzarakis and Mayer (1996) PET, and UTCI are shown by nine thermal levels from very cold to very hot in the monthly columns.”
A review of assessment methods for the urban environment and its energy sustainability to guarantee climate adaptation of future cities (2019, background): “It computes the radiation ﬂuxes and thermo-physiologically indices as the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV), the Physiologically Equivalent Temperature (PET), the Standard Eﬀective Temperature (SET*) [146], the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) [147], Perceived Temperature (PT) [148] and the MRT. SOLWE”
Overview of the PALM model system 6.0 (2019, methodology): “, 2012; Bröde et al., 2012), and physiologically equivalent temperature (PET; Höppe, 1999) are supported, directly calculated in PALM, and used as output. PT, UTCI, and PET follow a similar approach of equivalent temperatures. They generally calculate the overall energy gain or loss caused by the pr”
UTCI-Fiala multi-node model of human heat transfer and temperature regulation (2012, methodology): “Other COST Action 730 validation tests of the UTCI-Fiala model are described in Bröde et al. (2011b) and Kampmann et al.”