Influence of the Climate Change on the thermal comfort in the equatorial urban area: the case of Guayaquil (Ecuador)

It is widely known that climate change affects the thermal and human comfort in urban areas. This is more evident in equatorial towns that have experienced, in the last decades an increase of air temperature which, acting together with the increase of the rain intensity, generates a strong deterioration of the human comfort. Guayaquil is a tropical urban area that presents unique conditions and challenges (high vulnerability to flooding and climate change/variability, low urban green index, short and intense rainy season). The Guayas region has been affected by a climate change influence on the meteorological variable (precipitation, temperature) during the last decades. This paper presents the results of a project implemented by the Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral (Ecuador), jointly with the Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia e Hidrologia (INAMHI - Ecuador) and with the Politecnico di Torino and the Università di Torino (Italy). A climatological analysis of a dataset extracted from the weather data measured by the Automatic Weather Stations of the Guayas region was carried out in the presented research. The obtained results show how the change in the trend of the air temperature influences directly the Urban Heat Island (UHI) in the Guayaquil urban area.