Urban Microclimate models for predicting building energy use
The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is a well-documented phenomenon, in which the air-temperature in an urban area is elevated relative to the regional air-temperature due to the trapping of radiation by cities at night and anthropogenic heating during the day. Architects and engineers who design buildings in urban areas typically lack the tools to include the UHI effect in their analysis. For buildings that are climatically sensitive or aim to be net-zero energy, lacking adequate microclimatic design analysis tools constitutes uncertainty. Innovation in architecture is to provide guidance to design teams on both the potential magnitude of annual energy use prediction errors introduced by ignoring urban microclimatic effects, and potential reduction of such errors via the use of microclimatic models.
