Thermal comfort assessment over the past two decades in different landscape areas within Palembang City

Abstract

Abstract Urbanization has an impact on changing landscapes to built-up land so that it triggers changes in microclimate conditions and potentially disrupts the thermal comfort of urban communities. For two decades, the condition of air temperature and thermal comfort at two locations (Sukarami and Sako) in Palembang city with different landscape changes have been assessed in this study. The variations of air temperature over the past two decades were reported. The Temperature Humidity Index (THI) was an indicator for assessing thermal comfort and its values are categorized as comfortable, quite comfortable, and uncomfortable. The results showed that the air temperature in Sako increased by about two times greater than the increase at Sukarami which was 1.1 °C and 0.5 °C. This study clearly reveals that thermal comfort conditions have worsened in the last two decades. During 1999, the THI values were dominated by quite comfortable categories at both locations. After two decades, in 2019, the percentage of days in the quite comfortable category of both locations decreased by almost 60% at Sukarami and more than 80% at Sako. The main factor this difference occurs is the landscape changes with depletion of vegetation area at both locations.