Investigating the intra-urban thermal and air quality environment: new transect sensing methodology and measurements

Mobile monitoring can offer data of high spatial resolution within various urban contexts. Yet, devising efficient monitoring protocols for mobile campaigns is still a challenge. Relevant studies typically follow protocols based on the accumulated knowledge of authors and not standardized protocols. Thus the results may be prone to biases. Here, we present a transect monitoring methodology focused on urban areas’ thermal environment and air quality. The methodology follows a specific protocol for choosing the monitoring days and evaluating post-process corrections of the retrieved data and is applied within a city in central Italy at a seasonal scale with respect to the Sky View Factor. The presented method is simple, yet comprehensive and can be easily applied to almost any city and urban context. Results showed significant variations of the parameters measured, i.e. air temperature, humidity, short-wave radiation, wind speed, CO and PM10. For example, differences of air temperature within the same city may be up to 5.1 °C in autumn and differences of short-wave radiation may be up to 501 W/m in spring. The results of this study enhance the understanding of how to efficiently assess the quality of urban environments. As such, they could serve as a catalyst for developing mobile monitoring protocols, with the goal of enhancing the evaluation of urban environmental quality.