Tools to manage Singapore’s heat: Coupled climate and anthropogenic heat emission models for urban comfort in a digital twin framework

Abstract

Urban climate is influenced by many different factors, and identifying the optimal set of measures to improve well-being in cities requires expertise and information from different fields and tools to support planners and decision makers. In this paper, we present a Digital Urban Climate Twin (DUCT) that couples relevant computational models with various accessible data sets in cities to evaluate their impact on indicators related to urban climate and energy efficiency. The DUCT focuses on integrating climate models at the meso(city)- and micro(neighbourhood)- scales with anthropogenic heat emission models from buildings, traffic, industry, and power plants, which are not explicitly resolved in their original setup. The digital twin is structured into three subsystems: a Simulation-as-a-Service platform, the federation of models, and an easy-to-use user interface. The concept of the Digital Urban Climate Twin has been applied to the city of Singapore to demonstrate the methodology.