Determining Thermal Comfort Zone For Outdoor: Erbil-Iraq

This study finds out thermal comfort zones for outdoor recreation planning in Erbil. Therefore, spatial distribution of Physiologically Equivalent Temperature (PET), which is a measure of thermal comfort, was obtained for the City of Erbil using meteorological data collected from 6 different weather stations located in the study area. Air temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed are required for the calculation of PET. Data obtained from 6 meteorological stations recorded at 15:00 over the period from 1992 to 2015 were used to calculate monthly PET values with RayMan 1.2 software. PET was spatially interpolated using IDW tool in ArcGIS 10.2 to convert the point-data consisting of PET-values for individual meteorological station into a continuous surface so that maps of spatial distribution of PET values could be created. The most comfortable months and areas for outdoor recreation activities were determined by analyzing these maps. The results reveal fundamental information which is of particular relevance to recreation authorities.