Exploring urban planning strategies and their effect on mitigating heat waves - examples from New York City
UMEP is a versatile open source climate services tool for researchers, architects, urban planners, climatologists, and meteorologists, which can be used for a variety of applications related to outdoor thermal comfort, urban energy consumption, climate change mitigation etc. UMEP is developed as a plugin for QGIS a cross-platform, a free and open source desktop geographic information system (GIS) application. UMEP consists of a coupled modelling system which combines state-of-the-art 1-D and 2-D models with systems to input data from multiple sources, formats and at different temporal and spatial scales, and to generate output as data, graphs and maps. The tool also includes capabilities to connection to various databases such as WUDAPT (spatial) and WATCH (meteorology). This workshop will include a short introduction of the capabilities in UMEP followed by practical hands on exercise where participants will explore various climatological aspects of a heat wave event for cities such as New York and how various urban planning strategies can be used to mitigate such an event.
Link to UMEP webpage: http://www.urban-climate.net/umep/
Link to publication: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2017.09.020