MODELING LULC EFFECT ON THE URBAN AREA OF OTTAWA CITY

Increase of energy consumption and deforestation within cities has already begun raising average urbantemperature: this phenomenon is called urban heat island (UHL). A phenomenon in which there is aconsistent increase in urban air temperature and a decrease in the relative humidity as compare to ruralareas. Generally, research on this topic has been based on observational, theoretical and modelingapproaches. During the recent years, many models have been developed to analyze the relationshipbetween the UHI and the potential parameters such as meteorological or pedestrian level, turbulent model,urban complexity introduced by the roughness sub-layer, radiation model, and the anthropogenic heatincluding vehicles, stationary sources and metabolism.The paper first briefly describes the existing modeling approaches and it then reports the effect of landuseland-cover (LULC) on the UHI using the software Meso-scale Model version 5 (MM5). The city ofOttawa is used for this case study and the LULC parameters considered are: grass land, water and urbanareas.