Abstract:
The thermal comfort is one of the main issues nowadays. The implications from the modelled future climate projections also put a question of the expected thermal environmental conditions. The objective of this paper is a winter human discomfort study for Sofia and its surroundings. Data from numerical simulations with Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model were used to calculate a Wind Chill index, which describes the deviation from the winter thermal comfort. This index depends on air temperature and wind, and it is categorized in a 6-grade scale, which describes how far or close are the environmental conditions from the human thermal comfort. Numerical experiments with combination of different parameterization schemes for atmospheric boundary layer and microphysical processes were carried out. Model performance for the temperature and wind speed were used for estimation of the best model options for calculation of the Wind Chill index.