Quantifying the dualistic nature of urban heat Island effect (UHI) on building energy consumption

UHI has significant impact on building energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions in urban areas globally. However, the nature and extent of these effects are governed by the year-round climatic conditions at specific locations. In a dualistic relationship, UHI tends to increase the annual energy consumption of buildings located in hot climates and decrease it in cold climates. In this study, we conducted building energy simulations for 43 locations around the United States (U.S.) in order to quantify the relationships among the energy impacts of UHI and climatic variables. The energy impacts of UHI were found to be strongly correlated with several variables including degree days, absolute humidity, and solar radiation, while independent of wind speed and precipitation. Consecutively, we developed a multiple regression model to predict the relative energy impacts of UHI based on climatic context and evaluated the effect of UHI intensity on energy impacts across all 15 U.S. climate zones. The results of this study quantitatively validate the dualistic nature of UHI and present a statistical method to estimate the climatic variation in the impacts of UHI on building energy consumption. This can have significant implications in prioritizing UHI mitigation policies based on location and climate.