Strategies for bioclimatic design in an urban area of an arid zone: San Juan (Argentina)

Bioclimatic building design requires accurate site-specific climatic data. Owing to the substantial climatic variations in densely built urban environments with respect to the macroscale suburban terrain (Mazzeo N., 1984. Aplicaciones del diagnóstico climatológico a problemas relacionados con el urbanismo. Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires; Taesler R., 1984. Urban climatological methods and data. World Meteorological Organization, No. 652, Mexico) and taking into account that, in many cases, the available information is gathered by meteorological stations far from actual building sites, an exact study of urban climatic conditions becomes necessary. The objective of the present work is the determination of bioclimatic design strategies for the urban area of San Juan city, taking into account temperature and relative humidity data obtained for this area through mobile measurements.