Giedrius Kaveckis , Benjamin Bechtel

Land Use Based Urban Vulnerability to Climate Change Assessment

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Abstract

Urban environments are potentially threatened by changing climate, especially in form of heat and flash flood hazards. Therefore, there is an urgent need to assess future urban vulnerability to these phenomenons. Purpose of this research is to define heat and flash flood indicators, based on land use, cover and morphology ofurban environments. We enhanced a standard scheme of local climate zones with extended urban morphology, which plays a key role in urban heat island effect. As heat hazard indicator we defined number of days, with fixed threshold exceeded temperature. Meanwhile for flash flood hazard we selected Curve Number, which considers soil type, hydrologic condition, land use, cover and percentage of impervious surface. Both of these indicators can be related to discrete urban classes and be ranked by hazard severity. Further step is to model future urban environment withrelation of heat and flash flood hazards, which eventually will be incorporated into future urban vulnerability framework.

Keywords: vulnerability; local climate zones; land use modeling; urban heat island; flash flood; heat wave; urban climate.