Gerald Mills

University College Dublin | UCD · School of Geography

Due to its latitude and ample year‐round rainfall, Ireland is typically an energy limited regime in the context of soil moisture availability and evapotranspiration. However, during the summer of 2018, regions within the country displayed significant soil moisture deficits, associated with anomalous atmospheric forcing conditions, with consequent i...

There is a scientific consensus on the need for spatially detailed information on urban landscapes at a global scale. This data can support a range of environmental services, as cities are acknowledged as places of intense resource consumption and waste generation and foci of population and infrastructure that are exposed to multiple hazards of nat...

Mapping Green Dublin is a transdisciplinary, collaborative action research project led by University College Dublin’s School of Geography in collaboration with arts organisation Common Ground, artist Seoidín O’Sullivan, and event facilitators Connect the Dots. It took place in an inner-city neighbourhood of Dublin 8 between 2019 and 2020 and was fu...

A climate resilient city, perforce, has an efficient and robust energy infrastructure that can harvest local energy resources and match energy sources and sinks that vary over space and time. This paper explores the use of an urban building energy model (UBEM) to examine the potential for creating a near-zero carbon neighbourhood in Dublin (Ireland...

The European Unions (EU) Green Deal plans for a carbon neutral economy by 2050. Achieving this goal will require actions across all economic sectors, especially the building sector, which currently accounts for 40% of energy use. Residential energy use is a significant contributor, much of it due to an aging, poorly insulated building stock, much o...

For this volume, a survey was conducted among WMO Members in 2018 to judge the level of service provision in each area, the extent to which users and providers collaborate and the status of urban services currently provided. The common hazards that require Integrated Urban Services are identified as heavy rainfall, flooding, windstorms, tropical st...

This chapter describes a new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) approach to the provision of science-based services to assist the planning of safe, healthy, resilient and climate-friendly cities. The approach is outlined in full in the WMO Guidance on Integrated Urban Hydrometeorological, Climate and Environmental Services. Volume I, Concepts...

Cities represent a challenge to conventional climate modelling. Globally and even regionally, they are relatively small in extent and characterised by an extremely complex and heterogeneous landscape. At the same time, cities are of particular significance due to the exposure of the population to a variety of hazards. Over the past two decades impr...

Here we report on the preliminary findings from a pilot project titled ‘Urban Lab City’. The project investigates the influence of built form on air quality (Nitrogen Dioxide) and daytime air temperatures in the City of London. The study employs a network of 80 diffusion tubes that are installed along a network of streets that form a transect throu...

Knowledge of soil-vegetation-atmosphere energy exchange processes is essential for examining the response of agriculture to changes in climate in both the short and long term. However, there are relatively few sites where all the flux measurements necessary for evaluating these responses are available; where they exist, data are often incomplete an...

Although continental urban areas are relatively small, they are major drivers of environmental change at local, regional and global scales. Moreover, they are especially vulnerable to these changes owing to the concentration of population and their exposure to a range of hydro-meteorological hazards, emphasizing the need for spatially detailed info...

Globally, about one-third of final energy use and associated carbon dioxide emissions are sourced from buildings, the great majority of which are located in urban areas. Not surprisingly, managing building energy demand is a focus of city-based climate change policies while simultaneously tackling issues of fuel poverty. Assessing the potential for...

Integrated Urban hydrometeorological, climate and environmental Services (IUS) is a WMO initiative to aid development of science-based services to support safe, healthy, resilient and climate friendly cities. Guidance for Integrated Urban Hydrometeorological, Climate and Environmental Services (Volume I) has been developed with the intent to provid...

Cities are a spatial nexus for a host of environmental issues including global climate change, urban air pollution, energy management, flood control, exposure to hazards, and so on. Research on these topics and others often requires geographic data on the urban landscape and occupation patterns at appropriate time and space scales to understand pro...

The WUDAPT (World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools project goal is to generate consistent information on urban form and function for cities worldwide that can support a wide range of “fit for purpose” urban weather, climate, hydrology and air quality analyses and modeling on a variety of scales. The latest developments are designed to generat...

The WUDAPT (World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools project goal is to capture consistent information on urban form and function for cities worldwide that can support urban weather, climate, hydrology and air quality modeling. These data are provided as urban canopy parameters (UCPs) as used by weather, climate and air quality models to simula...

Assessment of surface urban heat islands (SUHI) has been hampered by the lack of a consistent framework to permit consistent interpretation between cities. Local Climate Zones (LCZ) are a universal description of local scale landscape types based on expected variation at neighbourhood scale (≥1km 2) in and around cities. In this study, we investiga...

Cities are major drivers of environmental change at all scales and are especially at risk from the ensuing effects, which include poor air quality, flooding and heat waves. Typically, these issues are studied on a city-by-city basis owing to the spatial complexity of built landscapes, local topography and emission patterns. However, to ensure knowl...

Mean ‘moving’ fraction (%) per built LCZ class. (PNG)

Mean pervious fraction (%) per built LCZ class. (PNG)

Mean building fraction (%) per built LCZ class. (PNG)

List of abbreviations. (PDF)

Mean impervious fraction (%) per built LCZ class. (PNG)

Mean tree fraction (%) per built LCZ class. (PNG)

This paper proposes a method for generating maps of Local Climate Zones (LCZs) within a GIS using administrative and 2.5D building databases. The LCZs are computed from morphological indicators and building typology, on vector reference spatial units that correspond to urban islets, i.e. blocks of buildings surrounded by nearby roads. The main orig...

This research was based on a 12-month desk study that modelled, for identified sample sites, the relationships between health indicators and the availability of green and blue infrastructure (GBI). It provided a route to identify measurable effects and results from a cross-sectional and area-based study.

Using the cloud-computing resources of Google's Earth Engine (EE) and a range of satellite sensors (input features) this paper for the first time explores the potential of up-scaling the current Local Climate Zone mapping efforts to regional and global scales. Using a transferability framework, we test whether information from one city contains val...

The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) project has grown out of the need for better information on the form and function of cities globally. Cities are described using Local Climate Zones (LCZ), which are associated with a range of key urban climate model parameters and thus can serve as inputs to high resolution urban climate mo...

Regulated energy loads of buildings are typically explored at the scale of individual buildings, often in isolated (and idealized) circumstances. By comparison, little research currently exists on the performance of building groups that accounts for the interactions between buildings. Consequently, the energy efficiency (or penalty) of different ur...

The extent, intensity and properties of building cover in cities is primarily responsible for a variety of urban climate effects. These include the patterns of solar access, wind and air temperature that impacts on both building energy management and the climates of outdoor spaces. Moreover, the occupation of buildings, which serve particular funct...

This study proposed regional coefficients for estimating hourly global solar radiation through the adaptation of some empirical models that relate radiation to climatological and geographical variables. A total of 10 models were adapted over 7 stations in Ireland. The performance of the models was evaluated using some selected error indicators incl...

Evidence-based strategies in this publication demonstrate how integrating climate science, natural systems, compact urban form and functions configure dynamic, desirable and healthy communities. The scholarship contends that confronting the challenges of a rapidly urbanizing world threatened by climate change requires expanding on the traditional i...

The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) is an international community-based initiative to acquire and disseminate climate relevant data on the physical geographies of cities for modeling and analysis purposes. The current lacuna of globally consistent information on cities is a major impediment to urban climate science toward info...

The Lamb weather type (LWT) categorization system is one of the best known procedures for summarizing the synoptic circulations that regulate daily weather. Traditionally, it is applied to daily sea level pressure, centred on a domain over the British Isles (BI), which is classed into one of 27 types (or 7 main types). The available register of LWT...

Evidence-based strategies in this publication demonstrate how integrating climate science, natural systems, compact urban form and functions configure dynamic, desirable and healthy communities. The scholarship contends that confronting the challenges of a rapidly urbanizing world threatened by climate change requires expanding on the traditional i...

Urban Climates is the first full synthesis of modern scientific and applied research on urban climates. The book begins with an outline of what constitutes an urban ecosystem. It develops a comprehensive terminology for the subject using scale and surface classification as key constructs. It explains the physical principles governing the creation o...

doi: 10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0106.1

The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) is a community initiative to collect worldwide data on urban form (i.e., morphology, materials) and function (i.e., use and metabolism). This is achieved through crowdsourcing, which we define here as the collection of data by a bounded crowd, composed of students. In this process, training...

In recent times, there has been an increased emphasis in research on the environmental and other associated benefits of green infrastructure, particularly in cities. The scale and duration of such studies vary, however, they all begin by mapping the extent and character of existing green infrastructure including parks, gardens, and trees. Tree cove...

A large body of evidence exists showing that the provision of, and access to, a good quality environment has detectable health benefits. These benefits include, inter alia, reduced stress and stress related illness, increased physical activity and higher self-reported satisfaction. While the presence of green and blue infrastructure (GBI) has been...

The network of urban vegetation present within a city, often termed the ‘green infrastructure’, has become increasingly recognised as crucial the health and well-being of urban residents. Urban green infrastructure provides a host of physical, economic and social benefits; including climate regulation, air pollutant reduction, increases in property...

One of the tenets of urban sustainability is that more compact urban forms that are more densely occupied are more efficient in their overall use of space and of energy. In many designs this has been translates into high-rise buildings with a focus on energy management at their outer envelopes. However, pursuing this building focused approach alone...

In this study, we are investigated the urban forestry cover of the urban areas in Dublin. This project was conducted in partnership with the four Dublin councils (Fingal, Dublin City, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown and South Dublin) and the Office of Public Works. We quantified the canopy cover area and assessed its spatial distribution, identified the pr...

Despite the great importance of cities, relatively little consistent information about their internal configuration (structure, cover and materials) is available. The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) initiative aims at the acquisition, storage and dissemination of data on the form and function of cities indifferent levels. At t...

A number of studies have examined the relationship between land use and/or vegetation indices (principally NDVI) with Land Surface Temperature (LST). However, few studies have examined this relationship across multiple years in order to derive a climatology of LST for urban areas and their surrounds. Fewer still have examined the relationship betwe...

Despite the great importance of cities, relatively little consistent information about their internal configuration (structure, cover and materials) is available. The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) initiative aims at the acquisition, storage and dissemination of data on the form and function of cities indifferent levels. At t...

One of the tenets of urban sustainability is that more compact urban forms that are more densely occupied are more efficient in their overall use of space and of energy. In many designs this has been translates into high- rise buildings with a focus on energy management at their outer envelopes. However, pursuing this building focused approach alon...

Urban areas profoundly alter the local atmosphere, hydrology and biology, usually for the worse. Increasing the vegetative cover in urbanised areas is considered an effective way of offsetting many of the undesirable outcomes of urbanisation and is often incorporated as Green Infrastructure into urban development plans. In this paper we present a f...

There is an urgent need for more detailed spatial information on cities globally that has been acquired using a standard method to facilitate comparison and the transfer of scientific and practical knowledge between places. As part of the world urban database and access portal tools (WUDAPT) initiative, a simple workflow has been developed to perfo...

Although more than half of the Earth’s population live in urban areas, we know remarkably little about most cities and what we do know is incomplete (lack of coverage) and inconsistent (varying definitions and scale). While there have been considerable advances in the derivation of a global urban mask using satellite information, the complexity of...

Although more than half of the Earth’s population live in urban areas, we know remarkably little about most cities and what we do know is incomplete (lack of coverage) and inconsistent (varying definitions and scale). While there have been considerable advances in the derivation of a global urban mask using satellite information, the complexity of...

Rapid global urbanization means that most people will experience the effects of climate change in cities. These effects are augmented by local warming. Much of theis current urban growth is in the warm, humid tropics of Asia and Latin America. This three-part book explores the unique local climate consequences of urban growth trajectories of tropi...

Anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) causes global climate change (GCC); addressing this issue requires policies for adaptation (to cope with the changing climate) and mitigation (to limit the magnitude of change). Applying these policies at the urban scale is critical for three main reasons. First, cities are located in landscapes that...