Seasonal Microclimate Trade-Offs Among Campus Open-Space Settings: An Exploratory Case Study in Tianjin, China

Outdoor settings on a campus can respond differently to summer heat and winter cold. This exploratory case study compared twelve predefined settings on a university campus in Tianjin using a summer peak-solar subset and a winter daytime subset drawn from two 72 h analysis windows in June and December 2025. Three Kestrel 5400 LiNK units and eight shielded DS1923 loggers were deployed at a height of 1.5 m. Direct instrument records were combined with archived background-weather and point-specific inputs on a 10 min grid, with measured and calculated fields identified separately. The Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) and mean radiant temperature (Tmrt) were expressed as anomalies from the contemporaneous twelve-location median. Point-cloud proxies at 10, 25, and 50 m described each location. The summer episode was hot and rain-free, whereas the winter episode was mild, humid, and calm. P09 had the largest negative summer ΔUTCI (−6.80 °C), P07 the largest winter deficit (−5.11 °C), and P10 showed a change from positive in summer to negative in winter. These patterns persisted in candidate-substitution and wind-height checks. The assembled case-campus data identify locations for repeat, fully synchronized monitoring.