Urban planning GIS tool for climate resilience

In a paper published in external page Energy and Buildings, Asst Prof. Yuan Chao and Dr He Wenhui from the Future Resilient Systems, together with co-authors from the National University of Singapore investigated transient street air warming and developed a practical Geographic Information System (GIS) -based model to estimate how much and how fast the air temperature will be increased by anthropogenic heat.

The GIS tool, developed in collaboration with National Supercomputing Centre Singapore, is meant to map the impact of urban planning on anthropogenic heat dispersion, specifically, how much and how fast the air temperature will be increased by anthropogenic heat.

“The weak removal of anthropogenic heat is caused by stagnated airflow at urban areas. It is crucial to investigate the effect of urban morphology on anthropogenic heat dispersion to make high-density cities more resilient to future challenges such as an intensive urban heat island effect,” said Prof. Yuan, who is the principal investigator of FRS’s Climate Resilience in High-Density Cities module.

Using this model, the dynamic air temperature increment aused by daily heat emissions was visualised in residential areas of Singapore. The maximum temperature increment with normal wind conditions could be about 0.45 degrees Celsius, which has a significant impact on both thermal comfort and public health.

The air temperature increment in residential areas could be even higher in the future due to rapid global warming and urban development, increasing the risk of long-term heat stress and short-term heatwaves.

The development of the new GIS-based analytical model, based on urban planning indices. is a cheaper and faster alternative for urban planners to estimate the impact of urban planning and design on anthropogenic heat dispersion, compared to fluid dynamics calculation used in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation and wind tunnel.

“Due to the huge uncertainty caused by urbanisation and global warming, the new GIS-based analytical model is a feasible tool to deal with numerous microclimate scenarios to help Singapore stay cool,” shared Dr Yuan.

This model can be easily adopted in cities beyond Singapore. By connecting this model with global and regional scale models, city-level findings can also be used to tackle anthropogenic heat problems globally. As the next step, the team will explore collaborating with researchers working on global and regional scale models. Air pollution as another important urban climate issue will also be integrated into this GIS tool.

Source: external page NUS press release