atmosphere Article The Sensitivity of Urban Heat Island to Urban Green Space—A Model-Based Study of City of Colombo, Sri Lanka Dikman Maheng 1,2,3 , Ishara Ducton 1, Dirk Lauwaet 4, Chris Zevenbergen 1,2 and Assela Pathirana 1,* 1 Dept. of Water Science and Engineering, IHE Delft, Institute for Water Education, 2611 AX Delft, The Netherlands;
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[email protected] (C.Z.) 2 Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Stevinweg 1, 2628CN Delft, The Netherlands 3 Department of Environmental Engineering, Universitas Muhammadiyah Kendari, Jl. Ahmad Dahlan 10, 93117 Kendari, Indonesia 4 VITO–Flemish Institute for Technological Research, Boeretang 200, 2400 Mol, Belgium;
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[email protected]; Tel.: +31-15-215-1854 Received: 7 February 2019; Accepted: 18 March 2019; Published: 21 March 2019 Abstract: Urbanization continues to trigger massive land-use land-cover change that transforms natural green environments to impermeable paved surfaces. Fast-growing cities in Asia experience increased urban temperature indicating the development of urban heat islands (UHIs) because of decreased urban green space, particularly in recent decades. This paper investigates the existence of UHIs and the impact of green areas to mitigate the impacts of UHIs in Colombo, Sri Lanka, using UrbClim, a boundary climate model that runs two classes of simulations, namely urbanization impact simulations, and greening simulations. The urbanization impact simulation results show that UHIs spread spatially with the reduction of vegetation cover, and increases the average UHI intensity. The greening simulations show that increasing green space up to 30% in urban areas can decrease the average air temperature by 0.1 ◦C.