URBAN CLIMATE ZONING IN RECIFE: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE URBAN PLANNING

Abstract

Although the climate is an important element of the urban environment, it is not usually taken into account in urban planning, and there is no legislation on the subject (Alcoforado et al 2006). Recife, as well as the other cities in its group, has not been contemplated with a substantive number of studies regarding its climate and these few studies focus on detecting the variability of the climatic components rather than establishing, in details, the relationship between the geographic factors interfering over those components. Our work aims to identify the different components of Recife’s social-environmental mosaic and to describe them through a climate perspective in order to classify them in urban climate zones. Using both the comparative and the descriptive methods, and the implementation of GIS techniques and remote sensing, we gathered a series of results organized in three stages: the first one approaches the temperature zones, the second classifies the city in units of form and urban occupation, and the third –a combination of the other two – where the five major climate urban zones and their subzones are presented.