Urban microclimate differences in continental zone of China

In modern cities, the block geometry and land cover feature directly affect the heat transfer between ground surface and atmosphere, resulting in significant differences of local microclimate. Clarifying this difference will help to accurately predict regional building energy demand and optimize regional layout design. However, existing microclimate research mainly focuses on tropical, arid, and temperate climate regions, leaving continental areas virtually unexplored. To address this problem and clarify the interactions of the urban blocks and microclimate, the combination of the local climate zone (LCZ) scheme and fixed-point weather station monitoring is employed to investigate the variation characteristics of the thermal and humidity conditions of typical urban blocks in continental zone of China. Firstly, sixty-seven typical urban blocks with self-built, national and regional meteorological stations are selected as the object of study, and classified into twelve LCZ categories, according to their inherent features. Secondly, the spatial and temporal variation patterns of the thermal environment indexes of the twelve LCZ types are analyzed and compared. Additionally, correlation analyses and regression fittings are performed between the thermal environment indexes and the urban morphological parameters. The results indicate significant differences in thermal environment indexes among different LCZ types. The mean temperature of built types is 0.72 °C higher than land cover types. The temperature and humidity exhibit a parabolic relationship with height of roughness elements and building surface fraction respectively, while the humidity has strong negatively correlations with the impervious surface fraction and the height of roughness elements.