Analyzing the Impact of Driving Behavior at Traffic Lights on Urban Heat

Studies have shown that traffic contributes up to a third of the anthropogenic heat produced in urban areas. To study localized effects of traffic on urban heat, conventional thermodynamic models are only of limited use because of their computational costs or low resolution. We are using our recently proposed Cellular Automata (CA) based Anthropogenic Heat Simulation to examine heat effects of dynamic traffic flow in close proximity to traffic lights. In this work, we use our method to study the impact that driving behaviour near a traffic light can have on urban heat.