Urban microclimate modelling with SPACERGY

Daniela Maiullari is a PhD stu­dent in the Depart­ment of Urban­ism in the Fac­ul­ty of Archi­tec­ture and the Built Envi­ron­ment at Delft Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy. By focus­ing on the rela­tion­ship between urban form, urban micro­cli­mate, and the ener­gy demand of build­ings, her doc­tor­al research address­es the tran­si­tion towards low-car­bon cities in future cli­mate warm­ing sce­nar­ios, and the increased need for space cool­ing. 

In col­lab­o­ra­tion with mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary per­son­nel from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Zurich and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bergen, Daniela has mod­elled the ener­gy and the micro­cli­mate per­for­mance of the new urban dis­trict of Flo­ri­ade, being con­struct­ed in the city of Almere in the Nether­lands. The new dis­trict will be show­cased at Flo­ri­ade 2022, the world’s largest hor­ti­cul­tur­al expo that will take place next year from 14 April to 22 Octo­ber. 

Growing a Green City

In line with the expo theme, ‘Grow­ing Green Cities’, the mas­ter plan designed by MVRDV com­pris­es all new build­ings, includ­ing pavil­ions for the agri­cul­tur­al expo, hotels and an exten­sive green struc­ture (arbore­tum). 

Fol­low­ing the expo, the devel­op­ment will be trans­formed into a res­i­den­tial area with more than 600 homes and will become Almere’s new city dis­trict named ‘Hor­tus’. 

After a year of con­struc­tion, the new dis­trict promis­es the most urban and green Flo­ri­ade to date, but will it be ener­gy effi­cient? To what extent will the large pres­ence of veg­e­ta­tion help to reduce urban heat and ener­gy for the cool­ing of build­ings?

Creating SPACE for Citizen Science 

Daniela is involved in ‘SPACERGY: Space-Ener­gy Pat­terns for Smart Ener­gy Infra­struc­tures, Com­mu­ni­ty Rec­i­proc­i­ties and Relat­ed Gov­er­nance’. The project takes a com­mu­ni­ty-cen­tric, liv­ing lab approach to inves­ti­gate the ener­gy tran­si­tion of urban devel­op­ments by bring­ing togeth­er var­i­ous dif­fer­ent stake­hold­ers to achieve inclu­sion, col­lab­o­ra­tion and informed action.

“Researchers, design­ers, plan­ners, archi­tects, project man­agers, pol­i­cy mak­ers, and the munic­i­pal­i­ty of Almere were invit­ed to a series of work­shops to eval­u­ate the mas­ter plan”, says Daniela. 

“Dur­ing the work­shops, we explored dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios con­cern­ing the spa­tial, ener­gy and mobil­i­ty infra­struc­ture of the new dis­trict. By using mod­el­ling tech­niques we sim­u­lat­ed the micro­cli­mate and ener­gy pro­file of the design solu­tions .”

Microclimate modelling with Envi-met

In addi­tion to liv­ing labs with stake­hold­ers, the aim of SPACERGY was to pro­vide guide­lines to sup­port informed deci­sion mak­ing about the new dis­trict of Almere. 

This work required 3D city dig­i­tal mod­els to assess the ener­gy demand and sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the dis­trict, as well as the pro­ject­ed ther­mal com­fort and urban micro­cli­mate as tem­per­a­tures are high­er in urban envi­ron­ments due to Urban Heat Island .

The 3D dig­i­tal mod­els using CityGML stan­dard (Geog­ra­phy Markup Lan­guage),  were cou­pled with ENVI-met, which is a micro­cli­mat­ic sim­u­la­tion soft­ware. The mod­els’ inputs are spa­tial data of the dis­trict pro­vid­ed by the City of Almere’s Urban Design Depart­ment and cli­mate data from the Roy­al Nether­lands Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Insti­tute (KNMI) weath­er sta­tion in Lelystad. 

FAIR Data Refinement

Daniela made her SPACERGY datasets avail­able in 4TU.ResearchData with the help of last year’s Data Refine­ment Fund. Daniela pub­lished the spa­tial input data; the ENVI-met sim­u­la­tion mod­el of the dis­trict; the 3D City Mod­el encod­ed in CityGML; and, the results of micro­cli­mate sim­u­la­tions in bina­ry for­mat (Part 1) or in an image or map for­mat (Part 2).  

Daniela explains her moti­va­tions for pub­lish­ing data in dif­fer­ent for­mats.

“The aim of the data refine­ment was to improve the inter­op­er­abil­i­ty of the datasets and enable their reuse by dif­fer­ent stake­hold­ers. The data had to be pub­lished in a for­mat that was easy to under­stand, inter­pret and repro­duce by var­i­ous end-users. For exam­ple, 3D city mod­els and bina­ry data are use­ful to researchers inter­est­ed in envi­ron­men­tal and cli­mate mod­el­ling, where­as images and maps are use­ful to design­ers, archi­tects and munic­i­pal­i­ties.”

She adds, “We used the ENVI-met soft­ware to trans­form bina­ry data into maps to con­vey infor­ma­tion about the rel­e­vant cli­mate para­me­ters, includ­ing air tem­per­a­ture, rel­a­tive humid­i­ty, wind speed and wind direc­tion.” 

“In order to make the data as repro­ducible as pos­si­ble, we doc­u­ment­ed each dataset with descrip­tive meta­da­ta. This includ­ed the pro­vi­sion of an attribute table which is a tab­u­lar file con­tain­ing infor­ma­tion about the geo­graph­ic fea­tures and cli­mate para­me­ters.”

Daniela states that mak­ing the data avail­able online was impor­tant for sev­er­al rea­sons. 

“First­ly, SPACERGY is a pub­lic project and stake­hold­ers require access to the data. We are oblig­at­ed to sup­port the lon­gi­tu­di­nal devel­op­ment of the mas­ter plan, and facil­i­tate the con­tin­u­a­tion of the con­struc­tion of the new dis­trict of Almere.” 

“Sec­ond­ly, it is our duty to make the data avail­able to advance this project and allow the ver­i­fi­ca­tion of the work once the new dis­trict is built and becomes res­i­den­tial in the future. It will be impor­tant to mod­el the micro­cli­mate of the dis­trict in years to come and con­firm our find­ings through mea­sure­ment cam­paigns.” 

“Third­ly, devel­op­ing a cli­mate mod­el is chal­leng­ing, time-con­sum­ing and the data often requires a large amount of stor­age space. By pub­lish­ing our data in the 4TU.ResearchData repos­i­to­ry we have ensured secure and long-term preser­va­tion of our datasets with­out con­cerns about stor­age.”

“Final­ly, our datasets are valu­able for edu­ca­tion­al pur­pos­es. The 3D dig­i­tal mod­els and ENVI-met mod­els  can be reused and adapt­ed by stu­dents to help them learn, and serve as a ‘proof-of-con­cept’ for mod­el­ling the micro­cli­mate of oth­er urban areas.”

Thank you, Daniela, for shar­ing the sto­ry behind SPACERGY. We wish you good luck with the com­ple­tion of your PhD!

If you’re inter­est­ed in learn­ing more about 3D city mod­els, read a relat­ed arti­cle from the Open Sci­ence Com­mu­ni­ty Delft (OSCD) about The Chang­ing Land­scape of Open Geospa­tial data. 

Writ­ten by Con­nie Clare (4TU.ResearchData)
Cov­er image by Ricar­da Möl­ck from Pixabay

It is our duty to make the data avail­able to advance this project and allow the ver­i­fi­ca­tion of the work once the new dis­trict is built and becomes res­i­den­tial in the future.

Daniela Maiullari, TU Delft.