A Digital Twin Framework to Simulate Urban Microclimates
Publication: ASCE Inspire 2023
ABSTRACT
Global cities are expected to face more severe climate crises in the future; therefore, it becomes increasingly acute to better understand urban microclimates, especially the urban thermal environments. This paper proposes an innovative urban microclimate digital twin framework for integrating multi-sourced spatiotemporal data, investigating effective modeling approaches, and exploring the mitigation potential of health risks and environmental harms resulting from extreme microclimate conditions. We examined our framework in the case of Phoenix to simulate its fine-scale thermal conditions. Our evaluation of multiple models shows that the GNN model outperforms other regression models by 36.3% and suggests that planting trees could be an effective strategy for heatwave mitigation. We also tested different urban greening strategies for their overall cooling efficiency, indicating that our framework can be used to assess fine-scale urban policy interventions and thus generate insights to inform the design and implementation of efficient mitigation plans.
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ASCE Inspire 2023
Pages: 617 - 622
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Published online: Nov 14, 2023
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