Climate Detectives Projects 2019-2020

Project title: The impact of large-scale development on the climate of our city and its reversibility through smart urban regeneration.

Team: Green Trust

2019-2020   CoderDojo Oradea   Oradea   Romania   10 Student’s age: 12-13, 14-15

At CoderDojo Oradea, kids that are not involved in our Space Robotics division but are interested in data analysis proposed to continue a project from last year and extend the data analysis we started we some of them and investigate how the accelerated development of the city is reversible through the implementation of smart urban regeneration policies, and see if they are starting to lessen the burden produces on climate by the large scale urban infrastructure upgrades our city went through. Temperature and precipitation data were gathered from public resources and personal measurements to see if we could see any difference. These results were then tried to be correlated with observational data from Sentinel’s EO browser. We looked for differences between the urban area and the surrounding rural areas, how our city grown in the last years, and how this impacted monthly temperatures year over year.

We investigated the changes in the urban and rural areas around Oradea using data from the Copernicus program (SENTINEL2A, 2B, and LANDSAT8) and vegetation (EO data) indices like NDVI, SAVI, GNDVI, PSSR, to observe the changes and differences in values, regarding vegetation and soil properties in the last 2 years. Our study shows that the climate in our region continued to deteriorate, but at a slower pace than in other parts of the country. The analysis of NDVI images shows a slight improvement in the urban peripheral area, because of the recent afforestation programs, mostly in the surrounding areas of the city. But inside the city, large urban transformation projects (infrastructure upgrades) continue to negatively influence the climate (the sizeable amounts of dust being a strong air pollutant). In contrast, the rural areas around the city are not affected and even show slight improvements. Comparing the temperatures and precipitation measured in both urban and rural areas, we see a change in the maximum monthly temperatures in the urban area, which are significantly higher compared to previous years. Our analysis suggests that the average annual temperature in both urban (Oradea) and rural areas next to the city is on a rising trend, while the number of frosty days is decreasing. From our precipitation data, the number of rainy days is on a downward trend, but the annual amount of precipitation does not show, on the contrary, an increasing trend, summer storms becoming more and more violent. Despite all these things, the climate in Oradea is not changing at the same pace as in other parts of our country and we can notice that the efforts made for urban regeneration give slight results.

Some measures required in the future consist of continuous monitoring of the afforestation process in the surrounding rural areas to the city and the urban regeneration process inside the city center. Speeding up the infrastructure upgrading process in the main city areas will impact less the climate and the sooner the upgrading process ends the more beneficial it will be for the climate, especially if the regeneration process is started sooner. Ecological awareness campaigns in the schools are also a good way to involve other students in such climate improving actions.