On the cooling energy impacts of combined urban heat mitigation strategies in subtropical urban building environment

Abstract

Regional climate change leads to more extreme urban heat in desert cities. This affects the building's performance negatively through an increase in cooling energy consumption. To our knowledge, this is the first study investigating the impacts of implementing combined urban heat mitigation strategies of cool materials and increased vegetation on the cooling load demands of 40-various types of buildings in Dubai downtown. Four urban heat mitigation scenarios have been conducted in combination with a base case scenario to examine the effectiveness of the combined strategies in reducing the cooling load demand by using the climatic data from weather research and forecasting model coupled with single layer urban canopy model (WRF/SLUCM) in CitySim. Results revealed that for non-insulated buildings there was an estimated 17.2% to 36.4% reduction in cooling energy demand whereas insulated buildings have an average reduction in energy demand ranging between 15.5% and 29.1%. This reduction in cooling energy consumption is higher when compared with other mitigation techniques like additional urban vegetation and modified cool materials.