Abstract：Extreme weather and climate events, such as heavy precipitation and heat waves, usually cause significant economic losses and human mortality in cities. Under a changing climate, some of these extreme events such as heat waves will likely become more frequent and more intense. In this presentation, how these extreme weather and climate events affect cities and how cities respond to them will be discussed. In particular, cities are found to be extremely vulnerable to heat waves because of synergistic interactions between heat waves and the preexisting urban heat island effect. Under such conditions, mitigation strategies aiming to reduce the heat stress in cities are strongly needed. New tools are developed to assess the effectiveness of different mitigation strategies such as the use of green roofs and white roofs at the city scale.
