Intensive Urbanization, Urban Meteorology and Air Pollutants: Effects on the Temperature of a City in a Basin Geography

Abstract

A qualitative study of thermal transfers is carried out from a record of measurements (time series) of meteorological variables (temperature, relative humidity and magnitude of wind speeds) and pollutants (PM10, PM2.5 and CO) in six localities located at different heights in the geographic basin of Santiago de Chile. The measurements were made in two periods, 2010–2013 and 2017–2020 (a total of 2,049,336 data), the last period coinciding with a process of intense urbanization, especially high-rise construction. The measurements, in the form of hourly time series, are analyzed on the one hand according to the theory of thermal conduction discretizing the differential equation of the temporal variation in the temperature and, on the other hand, through the theory of chaos that provides the entropies (S). Both procedures demonstrate, comparatively, that the last period of intense urbanization presents an increase in thermal transfers and temperature, which affects urban meteorology and makes it more complex. As shown by the chaotic analysis, there is a faster loss of information for the period 2017–2020. The consequences of the increase in temperature on human health and learning processes are studied.