ИСТИНА

Urban heat island (UHI) effect is a typical feature of urbanized environments well-studied for moderate and tropical climate zones. Its impact on environment and society is generally considered as negative due to the urban-caused acceleration of climate warming rates in the cities and amplification of the heat waves and related heat stress affecting human health and even mortality. For the cities located within harsh climates of high latitudes, positive social impacts of the UHI could be related with increasing the human comfort and decreasing fuel consumption rates during long cold winters. For example, significant decrease of heating degree-days within urban areas is shown even for moderate latitudes during the winter. During our short field trips in 2014-2016 to the biggest Arctic cities we used different measurements techniques: automatic weather stations (AWS), small temperature sensors (iButton), regular car-based temperature sounding and MTP-5 microwave temperature profiler. The analysis of the collected data showed the existence of significant UHI with the difference between city center and surrounding landscape up to 5-8ºC. The absence of a dense permanent urban meteorological network in high latitudes impedes development of urban climatology in the northern polar region where the global warming is rapid and amplified. High quality and density urban temperature datasets are required to monitor the thawing processes in urban soils, properly assess and project trends in the urban comfort and air quality as well as to estimate the impacts of climatic extremes. The current study presents the Urban Heat Island research network in Arctic cities (UHIARC), which has been deployed in several polar cities (Apatity, Vorkuta, Nadym, Novy Urengoy and Salekhard - see Fig.1) of the Eurasian arctic region in 2015-2017. The network comprises arrays of air temperature loggers (iButton) and one automatic weather station Davis Pro in each city. The UHIARC observations revealed strong and persistent positive temperature anomalies in all the four cities . This network can be also used in educational goals.