UNSW academics rank among the most influential globally

UNSW Sydney had 43 researchers in the top 10,000 last year in the world’s most comprehensive standardised citation database.

The latest release from the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford places 43 UNSW researchers in the top 10,000 scientists globally, based on citations received in 2019, the most from any Australian university. For career-long citations (from 1996), UNSW was second to the University of Melbourne.

This science-wide author database, which is publicly available and published in PLoS Biology, was developed by Professor John Ioannidis from Stanford University. It systematically ranks 160,000 of the most influential scientists, as measured by citation indicators which exclude self-citations and adjust for author position and number.

Synergies between urban heat island and heat waves in Seoul: The role of wind speed and land use characteristics

Jack Ngarambe , Jacques Nganyiyimana, Inhan Kim, Mat Santamouris, Geun Young Yun

The effects of heat waves (HW) are more pronounced in urban areas than in rural areas due to the additive effect of the urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon. However, the synergies between UHI and HW are still an open scientific question and have only been quantified for a few metropolitan cities. In the current study, we explore the synergies between UHI and HW in Seoul city. We consider summertime data from two non-consecutive years (i.e., 2012 and 2016) and ten automatic weather stations. Our results show that UHI is more intense during HW periods than non-heat wave (NHW) periods (i.e., normal summer background conditions), with a maximum UHI difference of 3.30˚C and 4.50˚C, between HW and NHW periods, in 2012 and 2016 respectively.

Impact on Ambient Temperature, Air Quality and Heat-Related Mortality and Morbidity

Urban vegetation provides undeniable benefits to urban climate, health, thermal comfort and environmental quality of cities. Despite the plethora of available scientific information, very little is known about the holistic and global impact of a potential increase of urban green infrastructure (GI) on urban climate, environmental quality and health. We have reviewed and analysed 55 fully evaluated scenarios and case studies investigating the impact of additional GI on urban temperature, air pollution and health for 39 cities. Statistically significant correlations between the percentage increase of the urban GI and the peak daily and night ambient temperatures are obtained.