The exponential growth of urban populations and city infrastructure globally presents distinct patterns, impacting climate change forecasts and urban climates. This study conducts a systematic review of the literature focusing on human thermal comfort (HTC) in outdoor urban environments. The findings indicate a significant surge in studies exploring HTC in open urban spaces in recent decades. While historically centered on Northern Hemisphere cities, there is a recent shift, with discussions extending to various metropolitan contexts in the Southern Hemisphere. Commonly employed urban categorization systems include Sky View Factor (SVF), Height × Width (H/W) ratio, and the emerging Local Climate Zones (LCZs), facilitating the characterization of urban areas and their usage. Various thermal indices, like Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET), Predicted Mean Vote (PMV), Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI), and Standard Effective Temperature (SET), are frequently utilized in evaluating external HTC in metropolitan areas. These indices have undergone validation in the literature, establishing their reliability and applicability.

This research concerns the identification of a pattern between the occurrence of extreme weather conditions, such as cold waves and heat waves, and hospitalization for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), in the University Hospital of Santa Maria (HUSM) in southern Brazil between 2012 and 2017. The research employed the field experiment method to measure the biometeorological parameters associated with hospital admissions in different seasons, such as during extreme weather conditions such as a cold wave (CW) or a heat wave (HW), using five thermal comfort indices: physiologically equivalent temperature (PET), new standard effective temperature (SET), predicted mean vote (PMV), effective temperatures (ET), and effective temperature with wind (ETW). The hospitalizations were recorded as 0.775 and 0.726 admissions per day for the winter and entire study periods, respectively. The records for extreme events showed higher admission rates than those on average days. The results also suggest that emergency hospitalizations for heart diseases during extreme weather events occurred predominantly on days with thermal discomfort. Furthermore, there was a particularly high risk of hospitalization for up to seven days after the end of the CW. Further analyses showed that cardiovascular hospitalizations were higher in winter than in summer, suggesting that CWs are more life threatening in wintertime.

This research is concerned with understanding the degree of human thermal (dis)comfort in connection with the various microclimates present in the vicinity of bike trails in Balneário Camboriú/SC, Brazil, throughout the summer. Local Climate Zones were determined using the Sky View Factor and were identified along research routes and schedules at 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. on a subtropical summer day (14 January 2022). Data were collected with weather devices attached to the bicycle, measuring air temperature, relative humidity, and globe temperature, from which the mean radiant temperature was calculated. The PET and UTCI indices were used to assess outdoor thermal comfort in the summer. The findings revealed that at 9:00 a.m., the eastern half of the city had a higher tendency for thermal discomfort; however, at 4:00 p.m., this same location had thermal comfort for users along bike routes. At 4:00 p.m., the PET index indicated that 24% of the bike paths were pleasant, and the UTCI index indicated that 100% of them were in thermal comfort. At 9:00 a.m., the majority of the city was under discomfort conditions. The index values reflect the morning time, and the study shows that there is now a negative correlation between the SVF and the indexes, which means that the greater the SVF computations, the lower the values are. The PET and UTCI indices revealed a positive association in the afternoon period: The greater the SVF values, the higher the PET and UTCI indices. Further research should be conducted in the future because many parameters, such as construction, position, and urban (im)permeability, as well as sea breeze and solar radiation, can have a significant impact on outdoor human thermal comfort in Balneário Camboriú, and when combined with the type of LCZ and the SVF, it is possible to understand how all of these active systems interact and form microclimates that are beneficial to bike path users.

Extensive urbanization around the world has resulted in the consumption of massive vegetated areas and natural resources. To this end, one strategy for urban development is to consolidate urban areas. In Balneário Camboriú/SC, Brazil, this trend has transformed the city into a vertical built-up area on its coastal strip, accommodating a large amount of buildings both in terms of quantity and number of floors. This research aims to quantify the thermo-hygrometric fluctuation on the waterfront of Balneário Camboriú, in negative radiation balance. To acquire the data on air temperature (Ta) and relative humidity (RH), two mobile transects and measuring at two fixed points were made in a situation of negative radiation balance on 26 August 2019, in the winter period of the Southern Hemisphere. The collection work began at 06:00:00 a.m. (before sunrise, the peak of the negative radiation balance), on Atlântica Avenue (waterfront) and Brasil Avenue (parallel to the waterfront). It was verified that the Ta varied from 16.0 °C to 19.0 °C, and the RH remained over 80% during the entire route. At the meteorological shelters, the temperature presented a variation from 14.4 °C to 17.7 °C, and the RH ranged from 79.6% to 91.3% between the two points. The spatial variability in the Ta and RH along the paths travelled and at the fixed points is directly related to the land cover, represented especially by the buildings’ verticalization and data collection time.

Os usos do território expõem as contradições históricas que se materializam no espaço e permitem a compreensão de determinados fenômenos socioespaciais, como a pobreza urbana, a privação, a seletividade e as desigualdades sociais em geral. Desse modo, o objetivo central deste estudo é pautado na análise dos usos do território urbano do Bairro Camobi, em Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul. Para isso, recorreu-se ao levantamento bibliográfico, a legislação urbana e trabalhos de campo. Estes foram utilizados para levantamento de dados, bem como, para construção de acervo fotográfico do bairro em estudo. Somaram-se ao total 10 trabalhos de campo dos anos de 2016 e 2019. Camobi, em tempos atuais, apresenta-se como um bairro heterogêneo, com diversas formas sobrepostas de uso do território, influenciados, principalmente pela Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM) e Base Aérea de Santa Maria (BASM). Estes determinam a dinâmica espacial do bairro, com a reprodução de condomínios horizontais e edifícios verticais, configurados como espaços de seletividade no bairro. O uso ferroviário, que no passado ocupou papel de destaque, hoje é caracterizado pelas rugosidades que marcam a paisagem da região Norte de Camobi, que denotam áreas de pobreza urbana e privação no bairro.

This study concerns in to collect, via a systematic review, papers from international academic researches that employed bicycles only to collect primary data on environmental variables for research on microclimatic thermal problems in urban contexts and others. Three international article search platforms were used. After reading the titles, abstracts, and entire works, 13 articles were chosen that employed bicycles in their mobile transects between 2011 and 2023. The analytical methodologies connected them to the thermal environment employed by the research, such as the primary characterizers of urban morphology, were visible from this. It is worth emphasizing that, while the platforms offer outstanding results in terms of article discovery, it is know that there are additional publications that employed similar technique but did not appear in the platforms' results. Six more items were discovered that were absent from the chosen search engines. It is significant to observe that, after looking over the 19 articles, the most part of them were only released in the past 25 years, with the oldest being found in 1998. Research has indicated that the use of bicycles to collect environmental data is related to the possibility that bicycles are more accessible than cars and more safety than walking along cities, moreover, this approach is less expensive. Apart from the several benefits that studies utilizing this methodology observed, it is believed that bicycles would be a more environmentally responsible and sustainable mode of transportation than alternatives. In this manner, it is hoped that additional research utilizing the effective mobile measurement technique with bicycles would be carried out in the future.