T. R. Oke is Professor Emeritus and former Head of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His research interests focus on urban climate and the energy and water balances of cities. Dr Oke has published more than two hundred scientific publications, and is author of the widely-used text Boundary Layer Climates (1987). He founded and was the first President of the International Association for Urban Climate. He has won several medals, including the Meteorological Service of Canada's Patterson Medal in 2002, for distinguished service to meteorology, and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society's Massey Medal in 2005, for substantial contributions to understanding the microclimates of cities. G. Mills is an Associate Professor in the School of Geography at University College Dublin, where he is also Head of School. He teaches in the areas of climatology, sustainable urbanism and spatial analysis. His research interests lie mainly in the climates of cities, especially at the human scale, and the potential for managing these through climate-sensitive urban design. He is a former President of the Geographical Society of Ireland and a former President of the International Association for Urban Climate. A. Christen is Full Professor at the Chair of Environmental Meteorology of the University of Freiburg, Germany where he teaches fundamentals in weather, climate, climate change and urban climate. Previously, he was Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and in the Atmospheric Science Program at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His research focuses on interactions between complex land surfaces - including cities - and the atmosphere. He develops new methods to quantify, attribute and model the exchange of energy, water and trace-gases between complex land surfaces and the atmosphere, in order to benefit applications such as climate-sensitive urban design, air pollution and emission management, urban weather forecasting and climate modeling. J. A. Voogt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Western Ontario. His broad area of research interest is urban climatology, with a specialization in the measurement and modeling of urban surface temperatures. He was the Co-Principal Investigator of the Environmental Prediction for Canadian Cities Network, a multi-institutional research network intended to develop and evaluate an urban-atmosphere model for the Canadian weather forecasting system. Dr Voogt is currently the President of the International Association for Urban Climate, and a former Chair of the American Meteorological Society's Board of the Urban Environment.