A Review of Recent Progress on Urban Microclimate Research

With rapid urbanization and increasing population in the last decades, more constructions have been built in the urban region, especially large cities. Therefore, researchers pay more attention to the interactions between urban microclimate and city dwellers. This paper presents the recent research progress on urban microclimates, mainly in the latest ten years from 2010 to 2020. 563 articles were reviewed, covering the investigation approach, different scales of investigation area, and topics. In addition, the development of traditional methods, including field or onsite measurements, wind tunnel modeling and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, and emerging methods such as artificial intelligence models, were discussed. Finally, this paper also reviewed the progress on key findings on the related topics about the urban environment, including urban wind energy, urban wind comfort, urban heat island, outdoor thermal comfort.