Climatic suitability for outdoor tourism in Romania’s big cities

The purpose of this research is to identify the best time of year for open-air tourism in ten of Romania's most populated cities. The climate conditions were assessed using the enhanced tourism climate index (ETCI) on a temporal scale of 10 days over 61 years (1961-2021) to determine the best times of year for outdoor tourism. For observing any change, we compared the last 10 years (2012-2021) to the entire period of the current study. Daily mean temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, precipitation and sunshine, maximum temperature, and minimum relative humidity were employed. The trend detection methods were the Mann-Kendall test combined with Sen’s slope and the parameters considered for change detection were the frequency of days ranked as good, very good, excellent and ideal for outdoor tourism; the duration of the occurrence period, the first and the last day of occurrence of each class. We found that the most appropriate weather for open-air tourism usually begins in the third 10-day period of April and ends during the second 10-day period of October. This study could become an extremely useful tool for better planning events for tourism and recreation in the short and mid-term.