The EarthTemp visiting scientist scheme funded Darren Ghent (University of Leicester) to attended an urban climate workshop on 17th September 2013 hosted by the Birmingham Urban Climate Laboratory (BUCL).

The overall aim of this workshop was to introduce the BUCL network and to forge links between the science community responsible for delivering urban climate data and the end-users of this data. The workshop was attended by 28 delegates from a diverse range of backgrounds representing both academia and business. The BUCL network was installed as part of the NERC-funded HiTemp Project and consists of a coarse network of 25 weather stations at an average spacing of approximately 3km across Birmingham, and a fine network of 131 air temperature sensors at an average spacing of approximately 1.5km. This delivers the most densely known network of air temperature measurements in an urban environment. Moreover, there are also ambitions to strategically install infrared radiometers across the network, which would provide unique opportunities both to investigate the relationship between ground-based measurements of land surface temperature (LST) and air temperature within an urban environment, but also to provide a potential capability to validate satellite-derived LST over a highly heterogeneous landscape; such possibilities are highly relevant to the objectives of EarthTemp. There are good opportunities for collaboration in utilising existing data from this network to better understand diurnal and seasonal temperature variability in such a highly dynamic system.