From the 4th to the 8th of September 2023, our partner Wageningen University attended the Annual Meeting of the European Meteorological Society in Bratislava (Slovakia), presenting I-CHANGE. This conference brings together meteorologists from a wide range of interests, from pure science, to operational forecasting, teaching and communications.
Gert-Jan – from Wageningen University – was traveling by train from the Netherlands to Bratislava, a trip of about 14 hours through a variety of European landscapes. In the train he met colleagues from the Dutch national weather service and from the Wageningen Young Academy: that was a great occasion to get updates about their research. During the Annual Meeting he presented results from the I-CHANGE Living Lab in Amsterdam, which focuses on measuring, understanding and forecasting indoor heat during heatwaves as a hazard. Hitherto the I-CHANGE Amsterdam Living Lab has now closed to 100 households hosting weather stations measuring indoor temperatures in their living room and bedroom.
Firstly, our I-CHANGE partner Gert-Jan presented a poster about 10 years of observations in the Amsterdam Atmospheric Monitoring Supersite. Herein a climatology of the urban heat island, the urban dry island, outdoor heat stress was presented for 24 outdoor weather stations. The partner that the urban heat island is strongest about 2-3 h after sunset, but is small or even negative during the daytime. Moreover, clear heat differences have been identified between building typologies. Surprisingly, Wageningen University found that moisture appears in the Amsterdam atmosphere in the summer afternoons, which needs further dig into to explain. The poster also showed the first results of I-CHANGE results from summer 2022, where it has been found indoor temperatures exceeding 30 degrees quite often.
Secondly, Gert-Jan gave an oral presentation, fully dedicated to the I-CHANGE Living Lab work, led by Esther Peerlings in the Meteorology and Air Quality Section. The temperature distribution in the Amsterdam houses reaches the 24 ºC threshold 30% of the time, while outdoor it is reached only 10% of the time. The research team found that indoor temperatures lag roughly 130 min in the diurnal cycle. Also, first modeling results to predict indoor temperatures were presented.
Apart from the conference, Gert-Jan was waiting for a heatwave in The Netherlands to perform a crowdsourcing activity to collect indoor temperatures by a wider audience than from our 100 households. While the Dutch summer of 2023 was relatively mild in terms of heat, a regional heatwave appeared exactly during the conference in Bratislava.
I-CHANGE colleagues from Kajo had prepared a dashboard for this data collection. Wageningen University and AMS-Institute wrote a press release and Arthur Maas – MSc student – was interviewed for AT5 (the Amsterdam city TV station).
Within about 3 days ~ 570 temperature records have been collected from a rather representative cross section of Amsterdam. Results indicate that the mean indoor temperature was 27.5 ºC which is for example above the thresholds for house rent deficiency.