Data driven monitoring of thermal profile: towards sustainable urban habitats

Abstract

Rapid urbanization with haphazard growth pattern often leads to intensification of built-up areas. The built-up areas increase the ambient air temperature and results in heat stress conditions thereby causing adverse health impacts. Therefore, mitigation of urban warming has become a major concern for urban administrators. Accurate identification of heat stressed areas has been difficult due to the low spatial or temporal resolutions of data collected through conventional methods. Hence, in this paper, we have applied an ICT based solution by deploying low cost sensor modules at various building typologies to continuously monitor and capture the diurnal thermal variations in air temperatures. With diurnal temperature profile, we could assess 1) the thermal gradient of varied built typologies and, 2) using spatial analytics, we could analyse the spatial variability of hotspots in the study area. ICT based data-driven approach provides a novel solution to thermal monitoring and inform future policies on building regulations to achieve the greater goal of sustainable urban development.