Ariane Middel

Ariane Middel is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on how urban form and design affect heat and human thermal exposure in cities. Dr. Middel has advanced urban climate science through applied and solutions-oriented research using unconventional field methods such as MaRTy (a mobile weather station), microclimate simulations, and human-centric modeling. She also pioneered urban climate informatics, a revolutionary research domain leveraging sensors, big data, and artificial intelligence to understand and respond to urban climate challenges. In 2020, she received an NSF CAREER award on “Human Thermal Exposure in Cities”. Dr. Middel is the President of the International Association for Urban Climate (IAUC) and serves on the “Built Environment” Board of the American Meteorological Society. At Arizona State University, she directs the Sensable Heatscapes and Digital Environments (SHaDE) Lab, which brings together students of all academic levels from multidisciplinary backgrounds to develop creative solutions for urban climate challenges confronting our society. Dr. Middel holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from the University of Bonn and received her PhD in computer science from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany.

Title: Built Environment and Heat at the Urban, Landscape, and Human Level

Description: This presentation introduces urban heat and its challenges for cities, using the living laboratory Phoenix, Arizona, USA, as a case study. What are urban heat islands? How is heat exacerbated or mitigated through urban infrastructure and design? What is the role of shade? We explore this “hot” topic in 3 dimensions: heat as it can be sensed by biometeorological instrumentation, heat as it is experienced by humans, and heat as it can be modeled using microclimate simulations. Examples include shade modeling for cool corridor planning and innovative human-centered heat sensing to quantify the heat load on a person’s body under extreme heat.

Learning objectives:

1. Explain how cities impact climate at the local and microscale
2. Understand the various types of heat measures (air temperature, surface temperature, mean radiant temperature) and how they vary in urban areas
3. Describe how heat can be mitigated through urban infrastructure, landscaping, and climate-sensitive urban design