adfa, p. 1, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 Relationship between Mean Radiant Temperature and Building Type for Pedestrians in Rotterdam Qun Dai 1* , Marc Aurel Schnabel 1 1 School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. {daiqun, marcaurel}@cuhk.edu.hk Abstract. Outdoor thermal comfort for pedestrians becomes important issues in urban planning affecting everyone’s daily lives. Mean Radiant Temperature (T mrt ) is one of the most important parameters in micro climate. In this study, we built a computerised model with variable and typical building types. Then a radiation model SOLWEIG was used to simulate pavements’ T mrt spatial varia- tions. We analysed and discussed the simulation results by comparing different building types. We used RayMan to find some relationship between thermal comfort index PET or PMV. Our finding can act as a reference for architects and planners to make design decisions on quantifying the thermal comfort in specific urban environment and their building types. Keywords: Mean radiant temperature (T mrt ), pedestrians, thermal comfort in- dex, spatial variations 1 Introduction Micro climate has become an important issue in urban planning and has a strong im- pact on human health. Some key meteorological parameters have a great influence on outdoor thermal comfort. The Mean Radiant Temperature (T mrt ) is one of these major important parameters. Several researches showed that there is a strong relationship between T mrt and thermal comfort index, such as Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET), during weak wind summer days [1-3]. Wind speed is low in medium-sized western European cities especially during heat wave. T mrt becomes an important thermo-physiological parameter in these regions, such as cities in the Netherlands or Germany. T mrt weighs all short-wave radiation flux in direct, diffuse and reflected and long- wave radiation flux emitted from sky, wall, floor [4], as well as the radiation flux considering the human surface area in each direction [5-6]. Currently there are four common micro-scale models to simulate T mrt , such as the ENVI-met Model [7] developed by Ozkeresteci, the point simulation model called RayMan [8], SkyHelios for calculating sky view factor and sunshine duration calculat-