“From coastal resiliency and sustainable green practices to the preservation of affordable housing, world-class public art, and vibrant, year-round programming in award-winning public spaces, Battery Park City leads the way in many of the measures that makes cities livable."
Drawing from real-time datasets, a new feature on BPCA’s website visualizes key climate indicators including temperature, rainfall, and wind speed in Battery Park City. This is a crucial first step by aggregating existing environmental monitoring stations to provide a local snapshot of how climate change is affecting our neighborhood.
A recent outdoor thermal comfort study of Battery Park City analyzed the neighborhood’s microclimate and its impact on occupants’ outdoor comfort. In the citywide context, Battery Park City is in fact a shelter from rising temperatures due to its rich urban tree canopy and green open space the neighborhood provides. Across New York City, areas with significant vegetated space are cooler and more comfortable on average, establishing a clear connection between urban tree canopies and urban heat island mitigation.
The resulting maps detail how factors like air temperature, solar exposure, wind, and existing shade from the nearby urban context and tree canopy influence people’s experience in an outdoor space. Findings illustrate how comfortable areas of Battery Park City are in relationship to the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI). UTCI is an equivalent temperature scale for quantifying the level of thermal comfort a person experiences; it also categorizes results into different comfort groups, ranging from extreme cold stress to extreme heat stress. With the results from the study, sets of maps were created to illustrate the percentage of annual hours that are comfortable in Battery Park City. UTCI combines factors including air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and radiant temperature (the effects of surrounding surface temperatures).
The effects of a changing climate are also being considered in the planting palette of the North/ West Battery Park City Resiliency Project. The plant palette follows an 80% of native plants in all areas and includes cold tolerant, southern-adapted species that will continue to thrive as the weather warms.
