The Amsterdam I-CHANGE team of Wageningen University is looking for 100 participants in Amsterdam to measure the indoor climate of their home – temperature, CO2 concentrations and humidity. This way they find out how hot or cold it gets in houses. This becomes increasingly important, due to climate change and the high energy prices. People spend about 90% of their time indoors, thus heat and cold can really pose a risk to their health. With the results, the research team can advise the participants on how to live healthier and more energy-efficient lives indoors and outdoors, for example by how to deal better with heat and cold. Here are some of their preliminary results.
Warm, sunny and dry summer
The summer weather of 2022 has been special! If we compare the July-August-September period with the reference climate, then the summer was characterised as warm, sunny and dry. At Schiphol Airport KNMI reported 18.1 ºC, while 17.1 ºC is normal. This summer was so far also very sunny with 731 sun hours that were reported against a normal of 583. Finally 137 mm of precipitation was measured while 238 was expected, which made the summer very dry (Table 1).
| Normal | 2022 | |
| Mean temperature | 17.1 | 18.1 |
| Min. temperature | 12.6 | 13.2 |
| Max. temperature | 21.4 | 22.8 |
| Precipitation | 137 | 238 |
|
Sun hours |
583 | 731 |
Special days in the Amsterdam Atmospheric Monitoring Supersite
In terms of urban heat, 19 July 2022 was a special day with clear skies and a high temperatures. The Amsterdam Atmospheric Monitoring Supersite recorded highest outdoor temperatures of over 37 degrees in Gaasperdam during daytime. Figure: At night the historical city centre and IJburg appeared to be the warmest spots with temperatures that did not drop below 23 ºC
What does it mean for indoor thermal comfort?
Even though the warm period in July 2022 was relatively short, indoor air temperatures reached high values. Or better to say: they did not drop at night. Figurer: In some houses the nighttime temperature remained about 25 ºC, with a few extremes reaching 30 ºC!
Apart from the single warm day, we studied how many hours the in-house temperature exceeded the norm of 27ºC. Over July-August-September the average exceedance was 127 hours, with a maximum of 349 h.
News within the project
First research results have been presented on a poster at the BBOS conference by Esther Peerlings. At this yearly conference, young scientists working in the Netherlands present their research related to environmental and climate sciences.
Interested in the poster? You can find it here
Contact
Questions? Please contact Esther Peerlings and Gert-Jan Steeneveld at: contact_amsterdamlivinglab@ichange-project.eu.