Environmental Meteorology, University of Freiburg, Priv. Laerchenweg 3, 79183, Waldkirch, Germany.
Munich Re, Koeniginstraße 107, 80802, Munich, Germany.
Int J Biometeorol. 2017 Sep;61(Suppl 1):23-27. doi: 10.1007/s00484-017-1390-5. Epub 2017 Jun 20.
Thermal effects of the environment are the most prominent environmental influences on the human body. Keeping the body core temperature in a narrow optimum range is the dominating physiological process. Thus, assessing thermal environments has been a major field in biometeorology for many decades, which is also reflected in the number of respective articles and their citations. In the early days of thermal assessments, simple indices only considering a few environmental parameters were used. The next step has been the development of heat budget models describing all relevant heat/energy fluxes to and from the human body. One of the first was PET, which has been presented in the most cited IJBM publication ever (1999). All of these models created by individual scientists have some shortcomings and confinements in their application. In order to overcome such restrictions and to bring the state of the art scientists of thermal modelling together a working group to define a "universal" thermal climate index (UTCI) has been founded, backed and driven by an own commission of the International Society of Biometeorology. This working group has developed a comprehensive open source tool to calculate UTCI for the assessment of outdoor thermal environments for biometeorological applications (see the IJBM special issue 56 (2012) on UTCI).
环境的热效应是对人体影响最显著的环境因素。将人体核心温度保持在狭窄的最佳范围内是主导生理过程。因此，评估热环境是生物气象学的一个主要领域，这也反映在相关文章的数量及其引用次数上。在热评估的早期，仅考虑少数环境参数的简单指数被使用。下一步是开发热量预算模型，描述所有与人体相关的热/能量通量。其中第一个是 PET，它是 IJBM 有史以来最具引用价值的出版物（1999 年）中提出的。所有这些由个别科学家创建的模型在应用上都存在一些缺点和限制。为了克服这些限制，并将热建模领域的顶尖科学家聚集在一起，一个工作组已经成立，该工作组由国际生物气象学会的一个委员会支持和推动，旨在定义一个“通用”热气候指数（UTCI）。该工作组开发了一个全面的开源工具，用于计算 UTCI，以评估生物气象学应用的户外热环境（见 IJBM 特刊 56（2012 年）关于 UTCI）。
