The 9th International Conference on Urban Climate

The study of urban climates now represents a full scientific field on its own. The 9th International Conference on Urban Climate (ICUC-9), held in July 2015 in Toulouse, France, provided a recent forum for urban climate scientists to share the results of their research. This introduction paper presents the 20 articles of this special issue. They are representative of the variety of the themes that are encompassed by the urban climate community: study of urban climate processes, new observational and modeling techniques and methods, urban design with climate, geospatial datasets, bioclimatology and health, interdisciplinarity, climate change mitigation & impacts in urban environments, and transfer of urban climate knowledge to urban planners. These papers were selected from student awards winners as well as from more senior researcher contributions. ICUC-9 was the largest ICUC held to date, reflecting the increased interest in climate and meteorology at the urban scale by the research community. The selection of articles helps point towards areas of future urban climate research. More planners, social scientists and scientists from outside the 'pure' discipline of urban climate were present than during previous editions, allowing the rise of new themes as interdisciplinary and transfer to urban planners.