Abstract Amid the health impacts of climate change, accurate evaluation of outdoor thermal comfort across residential areas with differing urban morphologies supports sustainable urban design and development. The Local Climate Zone (LCZ) classification system has been widely applied to studies of urban outdoor thermal environments; however, few studies have focused on differences in subjective thermal perception and thermal sensitivity across LCZs. This study investigates these differences among residents in six residential LCZs in Hangzhou, a city located in China’s hot summer and cold winter zone, using concurrent meteorological measurements and questionnaire surveys, and proposes an optimized model for assessing outdoor thermal comfort tailored to residential settings. Results show that LCZ type modulates thermal-environment dynamics and the range of the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI); residents’ sensitivity to thermal conditions differs across LCZ types; and the optimized assessment model improves accuracy by 8.8%-49.8%. In winter, the neutral UTCI for Hangzhou residential neighborhoods is 19.2 °C, with a neutral range of 17.1–21.2 °C. These findings provide references for urban planning and offer a transferable approach to optimizing evaluation of outdoor thermal environments in other climate regions.
WU et al. (Fri,) studied this question.