Quantitative Analysis of the Outdoor Thermal Comfort in the Hot and Humid Summertime of Shenzhen, China

Outdoor thermal comfort has always been a major issue due to its irreplaceable role in maintaining good health and energy use. Thus, quantitative analysis of outdoor thermal comfort and discussions on influential factors seem very necessary to achieve the climate-conscious urban design. Therefore, an outdoor thermal comfort questionnaire survey and the simultaneous field measurement were conducted in six different places during the hot and humid summertime in Shenzhen. The results show that the overall weather conditions during the investigation can be expressed with high temperature and high humidity with strong solar radiation. The micro-meteorological parameters of six test sites vary greatly due to their different regional spatial layouts. Moderate range of air temperature (Ta) is between 28 to 30 ℃ while that of relative humidity (RH) mainly concentrates in 60%-70% with the thermal sensation votes. The main influential factors impacting outdoor thermal comfort are obtained and Ta has the greatest effect. The overall thermal comfortable ranges in Shenzhen are expressed by the range of 28.14-32.83 ℃ of PET and 24.74-30.45 ℃ of SET*. With the correlation analysis between the characteristic parameters of regional spatial layout and thermal climate and thermal comfort, it reveals that increasing the coverage ratio of water and green space (S) helps lower Ta and increase RH. The global solar radiation (G) has a significant negative correlation with the height of buildings (H) and a positive correlation with sky view factor (SVF). Overall, reasonable configuration of the regional spatial layout contributes to providing a thermal comfortable environment.