History of IAUC

Several very successful international conferences on urban climate have been held since the late 1960s. One set was organized by the World Meteorological Organisation (also WHO and sometimes with CIB) in Brussels, Moscow and Mexico City. A second set was run by IFHP in Herzliya-on-Sea and Karlsruhe. The two merged to hold the joint International Conference on Urban Climatology (ICUC) together with other occasional cosponsors (e.g. AMS, ISB) in Kyoto (1989), Dakha (1993), Essen (1996) and Sydney (1999). In Sydney there was a general consensus that ICUC should be constituted as a more formal entity than it currently is, but that it should be a loosely structured organization without expensive trappings.

In order to move this notion forward, it was decided in Sydney to form an interim board to create this organization. For simplicity, the unofficial board consisted of a member from each of the organizations involved in the Sydney meeting (Professor John Arnfield [IGU]; Professor Arieh Bitan [IFHP]; Professor Sue Grimmond [AMS]; Professor Tim Oke [ISB] and a representative from WMO).  They considered it useful to move to the next stage and:

create an organizational structure that has representation from the full range of the urban climate community, and
issue a call for proposals to host the next ICUC, probably to be held in 2002 or 2003.

Subsequently, membership in this urban climate organization was sought via the internet (specifically through the Indiana University-based urban climate list and CLIMLIST) and the election of a ten person board took place, also via the internet.

The board met for its inaugural meeting at the AMS Urban Environment Symposium in Davis, California, in August, 2000.

Among the decisions at that meeting was to take the final choice of the organizations’s name to the membership and a vote (open to all members) was conducted in September and October 2000 which resulted in the selection of “International Association for Urban Climate”.

IAUC commitments

The IAUC is committed to, and promotes inclusive and equitable participation of a diverse community in its membership and activities including publications, meetings, conferences, awards and honors. It seeks membership from those with scientific, scholarly and technical interests and responsibilities in:

the climatology and meteorology of built-up areas,
exchange processes between the urban “surface” and the overlying boundary layer,
urban air quality,
wind and turbulence in the city,
measurement, modeling and remote sensing of urban atmospheric and surface characteristics at all scales,
micro-scale processes and patterns associated with urban landscape elements (buildings, canyons, parks, roads etc),
building climatology,
biometeorology and bioclimatology within urban ecosystems, including human comfort and hazards,
the inclusion of urban atmospheric processes into design and planning and the modelling of weather, and
the representation of urban landscapes in models of climate at meso-scales

The IAUC communicates with its members via this website and using the moderated IAUC mailing lists.