Urban Climate
Literature Atlas

Literature identification. The IAUC Bibliography Committee has catalogued urban climate publications since 2003. For this atlas, we queried the Web of Science Core Collection across 111 journals, plus two journals screened manually (Nature Cities and Cities and the Environment). An initial broad query yielded approximately 127,000 records; an iterative Delphi process refined the search terms and inclusion criteria. The final query—(urban* OR city OR cities) AND (atmospher* OR *climat* OR *meteorolog*)—returned 36,483 records, screened by experts on title and abstract, yielding 8,502 papers.

LLM-based extraction. Each paper was processed by Google Gemini 2.5 Pro with native PDF support. The model extracted 51 structured metadata fields—bibliographic information, study location and period, methodology flags, and content summaries. Every extracted value is evidence-grounded with page numbers and verbatim quotes from the source PDF.

Expert validation. Forty domain experts each reviewed 25 papers in a blind protocol—no LLM predictions were shown. The stratified sample of 999 papers (12% of the corpus) confirmed 86% agreement on inclusion decisions (Cohen’s κ = 0.43), 96–98% accuracy on content summaries, and 91–95% on methodology flags.

Enrichment analysis. Beyond the base extraction, each paper was further classified along several dimensions: geographic and climate-zone typology, contribution type (empirical, fundamental, applied, or synthesis), and alignment with IPCC AR6 and SR Cities chapter themes. These enrichment layers enable the thematic, geographic, and policy-relevant views in the atlas.

From evidence to atlas. The validated and enriched metadata feeds this searchable interface. Browse by geography, methodology, or research theme; filter by year or inclusion confidence; and explore individual papers with their extracted evidence.