Assessment of urban microclimate in mediterranean climate conditions: the case of İzmir - Karşıyaka

With the industrial revolution, green areas have decreased due to the acceleration of urbanization and human activities, and impermeable surfaces have replaced the decreasing green areas. Depending on this changing land cover in urban landscapes, different micro-climatic areas have been formed. This change, starting from micro-scales to macro-scales, has caused negative effects in terms of human thermal comfort, especially outdoors. In this study, which was carried out in order to examine the effects of the interventions made on the changing urban textures on the urban microclimates; 3 research areas with different urban texture were examined with different variations based on the amount of green area, plant material type and surface properties. In these climate simulations created with ENVI-met software, the thermal comfort index PMV and TMRT and air temperature changes were examined. According to the findings of the study, it has been determined that a temperature decrease of up to 2.5˚C may occur in the Karşıyaka - Çiğli study areas, where the Mediterranean climate is dominant, due to the increased amount of green space and permeable surface. In addition, positive changes were observed in the psychological stress levels in the simulation results. In addition to the measures to be taken globally in order to mitigate the effects of climate change, which is one of the most important problems of today, interventions to be made at micro scales, as well as within the scope of the research, are of great importance. In this context, increasing the amount of green areas and reducing the amount of impermeable surfaces will be very effective in improving the uncomfortable climatic conditions in urban areas.