Abstract
As cities and their population are subjected to climate change and urban heat islands, it is paramount to have the means to understand the local urban climate and propose mitigation measures, especially at neighbourhood, local and building scales. A framework is presented, where the urban climate is studied by coupling a meteorological model to a building-resolved local urban climate model, and where an urban climate model is coupled to a building energy simulation model. The urban climate model allows for studies at local scale, combining modelling of wind and buoyancy with computational fluid dynamics, radiative exchange and heat and mass transport in porous materials including evaporative cooling at street canyon and neighbourhood scale. This coupled model takes into account the hygrothermal behaviour of porous materials and vegetation subjected to variations of wetting, sun, wind, humidity and temperature. The model is driven by climate predictions from a mesoscale meteorological model including urban parametrisation. Building energy demand, such as cooling demand during heat waves, can be evaluated. This integrated approach not only allows for the design of adapted buildings, but also urban environments that can mitigate the negative effects of future climate change and increased urban heat islands. Mitigation solutions for urban heat island effect and heat waves, including vegetation, evaporative cooling pavements and neighbourhood morphology, are assessed in terms of pedestrian comfort and building (cooling) energy consumption.
Highlights
Climate change and the urbanization around the world ask more than ever for a detailed study of the urban climate
Adequate initial and boundary conditions for the proper modelling of the temporal and spatial evolution of the state of the atmosphere are prescribed coming from global models like GFS (Global Forecast System) or ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) or nested models derived from the global ones like MeteoSwiss
We found that a higher wind speed (HW) leads to higher Local Heat Islands (LHI) intensities in a medium-density building cluster compared to the cases of lower wind speeds (LW)
Summary
Climate change and the urbanization around the world ask more than ever for a detailed study of the urban climate. We present our recently developed CFD-HAM-Radiation-Vegetation model heat and moisture transport in urban materials, radiation and vegetation at local scale. We review our recent findings with respect to evaporative cooling using wetted pavements This model is applied in a new case study for a public square in the city of Zurich coupled to MMM. We believe that this combination of an overview of our previous and present new work demonstrates that both CFD-BES and CFD-HAM-Radiation-Vegetation models enable the exploration of the complex interactions of the physical processes taking place in an urban environment at the appropriate respective scale.
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