Urban Microclimate Assessment

Today, cities face challenges in the ways they are planned, designed, organised, maintained and used. They experience higher temperature compared to their surrounding areas. This happens because of solar radiations being trapped within urban areas and human activities that generate a lot of heat. This is known as Urban Heat Island, which is a serious challenge as it generates discomfort and health risks for the inhabitants, higher energy consumption and intensifies climate change impacts in cities.

Cities municipalities need the expertise to invest money appropriately for successful projects to combat these challenges, and architects need to focus more on heat mitigation and highlight their efforts for it. At ECOTEN, we provide urban climate assessment for renovated and new neighbourhood, using numerical simulations of physical phenomena of urban microclimate. With this, it is possible to assess the impacts of a particular design on the urban climate and to highlight their benefits. Our results are on air temperature, solar irradiation, wind speed, and people’s thermal stress index during hot weather period. Thank to that, we propose, optimize and evaluate solutions for urban development, with a focus on blue-green-white strategies, in order to add value to urban and building designs, to improve thermal comfort and mitigate urban heat island.
We present our results graphically for easy comprehensibility for urban development stakeholders, who benefit from possibilities to verify the quality of design and comparison before taking final decision. This is a decision-making tool for making sustainable, energy-efficient and comfortable urban designs.